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Re: Why not 13 months? (Was La Systeme Metrique)
gutaye@mercury.ncat.edu
Wed, 12 Jul 1995 07:47:21 GMT
I read that you guys are discussing the number of months in a year. Since
I just read your points of view and some refrences I may not be able to
agree or disagree with the ideas you have presented. In case you need to
refer to cultures who have thirteen months in a year, one of them is the
Ethiopia Calender. According to this Calender the year has 13 months and
it is now 1987. The 13th moth has 5 or 6 days (for the leap year).
ak
In article <3tvb40$3pu@apakabar.cc.columbia.edu> xuelei@cuphy3.phys.columbia.edu (Xuelei Chen ) writes:
>In article <3tsqpn$4u4@lace.Colorado.EDU>, hgibbons@hoshi.Colorado.EDU (Hugh Gibbons) writes:
>|> Richard P. Muller (rmuller@invitro.invitro.usc.edu) wrote:
>|>
>|> > I think you also have to recognize the significance of the number 12
>|> > to ancient cultures. Many of these cultures had a hard time with
>|> > non-integers, so their number systems had bases that could be divided
>|> > by many smaller numbers.
>|>
>|> > I believe that the Sumerian number system was based on 60 (1*2*3*4*5).
>|> > This is also a good explaination also for why there are 60 minutes in
>|> > an hour. Similarly, the number 12 (1*2*3*4) plays a large role in many
>|> > similar cultures. I think that people believed that whatever calendar
>|> > system they chose had to fit into cosmic harmony as they saw it, and
>|> > so they shoe-horned the calendar into 12 months, even though 13 may
>|> > have been more practical.
>|>
>|> If you assume that the original definition of the month was based on
>|> the lunar period (full moon to full moon or new moon to new-moon),
>|> twelve would be a closer approximation than 13. (There are
>|> 12.37 cycles of the moon per year.)
>
>
>In Chinese traditional calender, in some years there are 13 months.
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