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No such thing as a solar month



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penguin




 
 
    
 

Post Thu, Dec 11 2014, 5:38 pm
You may or may not agree that this belongs under Interesting Discussions. I wasn't sure where else it might go.

So you may recall from school that the emperors Julius and Augustus decided they wanted their own months and added them to the calendar (or did something to manipulate their months to be longer).

But, this was just pointed out to me today, before that there were ten months. And that's why the last one is December (as in decimal). And the others are September, October and November (as in the Latin names for 7,8,9).

I, personally, found it quite interesting. YMMV.

Oh, also this. A month in the secular calendar is just an arbitrary measurement, unlike lunar months that have physical meaning. We can speak of a solar year, but not a solar month.

You can get an inkling of how those original months were set up by looking at how they are now (30 days have September...)

January.....31......June...........30
February...28.....September...30
March........31.....October.......31
April..........30.....November....30
May...........31.....December....31

Okay, it was supposed to be a pattern. To sure what happened to June. But anyhow, you see how giant their egos were, that they had to each have 31 days. I imagine that they stole them from February. I will go look it up....

Well, Wikipedia disagrees with this theory. It sounds like there are all different theories about the original lengths of the months, though some do include adding to "their" months. However, they do not seem to address the reason those four months are numbered 7,8,9,10.
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