About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Calendar reform

Encyclopedia : C : CA : CAL : Calendar reform

Various reforms to the Gregorian calendar currently used by most of the world have been proposed.

Reformers cite several problems with the Gregorian calendar:

Contents

Perpetual calendars

Many calendar reforms have offered solutions to make the calendar perpetual. These reforms would make it easy to work out the day of week of a particular date, and would make changing calendars each year unnecessary.

These make it easier to work out the day of week by having exactly 52 weeks in each year plus an extra day not belonging to any week and also having the leap day outside of any week.

For example, The World Calendar and the International Fixed Calendar are proposals that start each month on a Sunday. The remaining 364 days then form 52 weeks of 7 days. The World Calendar has every third month beginning on the same day of week.

Both of these calendars treat one or two days (the 365th day, and the 366th leap year day) each year as outside of any week or month in order to keep the calendar perpetual. In The World Calendar, these days are considered holidays and named Worlds Day and Leap Year Day. These "off-calendar", or "intercalary", days stand outside the seven-day week and caused some religious groups to strongly oppose adoption of The World Calendar. Such concerns helped prevent The World Calendar from being adopted in the 1940s and 1950s.

Supporters of The World Calendar, however, argue that the religious groups' opposition overlooked every individual's right to celebrate these holidays as extra days of worship, or Sabbaths. This option, they reason, maintains the seven-day worship cycle for those who share that concern, while allowing benefits of a perpetual calendar to be shared by all.

The 13-month calendar loses appeal with some when it is realized that that it actually destroys quarters. Adding the 13th month is considered by some to be a disadvantage because the disruption it causes results in more problems than the calendar it aspires to replace.

Some calendar reform ideas, such as the Pax Calendar, New Earth Calendar, Symmetry454 calendar and the Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time Calendar, were created to solve this problem by having years of either 364 days (52 weeks) or 371 days (53 weeks), thus preserving the 7-day week.

These calendars add a leap week of seven days to the calendar every five or six years to keep the calendar roughly in step with the solar year.

The Symmetry454 calendar has alternating months of 28 and 35 days, and a leap week in December, when needed. The Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time Calendar has months of 30 and 31 days, but includes an occasional 7-day leap week named “Newton”.

The 53-week calendar, used in government and in business for fiscal years, is a variant of this concept. Each year of this calendar can be up to 371 days long.

Still other proposals, like the 30x11 Calendar, abandon attempts to make the calendar perpetual, instead opting for eleven 30-day months and one "long month" of December at 35 days, or 36 days in leap years.

13-month calendar proposals

Some calendar reformers seek to equalize the length of each month in the year. This is accomplished by creating a calendar that has 13 months of 28-days each, making 364 days.

An early 13-month proposal was the 1849 Positivist calendar, created by Auguste Comte. It was based on a 364-day year which included one or two "blank" days. Each of the 13 months had 28 days and exactly four weeks, and each started on a Monday. The International Fixed Calendar is a more modern descendant of this calendar.

Another example of the use of "blank" days is the 13 moon calendar, which views the uncounted 365th and 366th days as "days out of time".

Some proposals, such as the Sol Calendar, add one or two days to the calendar each year to account for the annual solar cycle, while others keep these days off the calendar entirely, to make the calendar perpetual.

Around 1930 Colligan invented the Pax Calendar, which avoids off-calendar days by adding a 7-day leap week to the perpetual 364-day year for 71 out of 400 years. The New Earth Calendar does likewise by adding a leap week once every 5 years with exceptions.

Naming proposals

Calendar proposals that introduce a thirteenth month or change the Julian-Gregorian system of months often also propose new names for these months. New names have also been proposed for days out of the week cycle (e.g. 365th and leap) and weeks out of the month cycle. In The World Calendar, for example, the last day of the year is "Worldsday".

Proposals to change the traditional month and weekday names are less frequent, although their origins are mostly gods of now obsolete religions (e.g. Thursday from Nordic Thor or March from Roman Mars) or leaders of vanished empires (July and August from the first Cæsars), or ordinals that got out of synchronization (September through December, originally seventh through tenth, now ninth through twelfth).

See also

Specific proposals

There have been many specific calendar proposals to replace the Gregorian Calendar: There have also been proposals to revise the way years are numbered:

Further reading

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: