All About Calendars

Calendar systems are based around major historical events and calendars have continually being altered and corrected and sometimes completely redefined. The calendar base that we use today was not conceived until the year 525 AD. At that time the Roman Calendar was still being used which was based on the founding of the city of Rome on April 22, 753 BC.

The new calendar was conceived by a monk called Dionysius Exiguus. He proposed that Christ was born in the year of Rome 753 but most historians agree that it should have been some years earlier. The Venerable Bede, an English monk, through his writings in the 8th century re-chronicled history. Up to that time people had been living, say, in the (Roman) year 1500 suddenly found they were living in 747 AD. Don't believe anyone who finds a coin with a year in the first 6 centuries AD (they didn't exist for the people living in that time.)

Changes have happened since Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar in 1582 AD, who eliminated the accumulated error caused by a faulty calculation of the length of a year and avoided its recurrence by restricting century leap years to those divisible by 400. (Yes, 2000 is a leap year). This was introduced in Roman Catholic countries and other states only gradually changed from Old Style to New Style; Britain and its colonies didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar for almost two centuries in 1752 AD, when the error amounted to 11 days. The 3 September 1752 AD became 14 September 1752 AD. Up until then England had celebrated beginning of the year on 25 March; after 1752 it was moved to 1 January.

What is a Calendar?

A calendar is the division of the year into months, weeks, and days and the method of ordering the years. From year one, an assumed date of the birth of Jesus, dates are calculated backwards (BC 'before Christ' or BCE 'before common era') and forwards (AD, Latin Anno Domini 'in the year of the lord' , or CE 'common era'). The lunar month (period between one new moon and the next) naturally averages 29.5 days, but the Western calendar uses for convenience a calendar month with a complete number of days, 30 or 31 (Feb has 28). For adjustments, since there are slightly fewer than six extra hours a year left over, they are added to Feb as a 29th day every fourth year (leap year), century years being excepted unless they are divisible by 400. For example, 1896 was a leap year. 1900 was not. 2000 is a leap year.

Months of the Year

A lot of languages, including English, use month names based on Latin. Their meaning is listed below. However, some languages (Czech and Polish, for example) use quite different names.

Here are the names of the months in several languages:

The Chinese Calendar

The Chinese lunar year is divided into 12 months of 29 or 30 days. The calendar is adjusted to the length of the solar year by the addition of extra months at regular intervals. The years are arranged in major cycles of 60 years. Each successive year is named after one of 12 animals: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar. These 12-year cycles are continuously repeated. Therefore, every twelve years the same animal name or "sign" would reappear. The Chinese New Year is celebrated at the second new moon after the winter solstice and falls between January 21 and February 19 on the Gregorian calendar. The year 2003 translates to the Chinese year 4700–4701.

	Rat	1924	1936	1948	1960	1972	1984	1996
	Ox	1925	1937	1949	1961	1973	1985	1997
	Tiger	1926	1938	1950	1962	1974	1986	1998
	Rabbit	1927	1939	1951	1963	1975	1987	1999
	Dragon	1928	1940	1952	1964	1976	1988	2000
	Snake	1929	1941	1953	1965	1977	1989	2001
	Horse	1930	1942	1954	1966	1978	1990	2002
	Sheep	1931	1943	1955	1967	1979	1991	2003
	Monkey	1932	1944	1956	1968	1980	1992	2004
	Rooster	1933	1945	1957	1969	1981	1993	2005
	Dog	1934	1946	1958	1970	1982	1994	2006
	Boar	1935	1947	1959	1971	1983	1995	2007

Days of the Week

The week of seven days was adopted in Rome somewhere about 400 AD, and spread into Europe, but had been recognized as a period of time long before that in the east. It was probably chosen to give one day each to each of the seven planets known in antiquity. In the southern countries of Europe, the days of the week were named after the gods of the Greeks and Romans. In the English language, as well as in the languages of some of the countries of northern Europe, the gods of the north have given their names to the days.

The Greeks named the days week after the sun, the moon and the five known planets, which were in turn named after the gods Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Cronus. The Greeks called the days of the week the Theon hemerai "days of the Gods". The Romans substituted their equivalent gods for the Greek gods, Mars, Mercury, Jove (Jupiter), Venus, and Saturn. (The two pantheons are very similar.) The Germanic peoples generally substituted roughly similar gods for the Roman gods, Tiu (Twia), Woden, Thor, Freya (Fria), but did not substitute Saturn.

The Ashanti and some other peoples of West Africa gave a child a special name according to the day of the week on which he was born. The habit was brought to the American South and Caribbean through slavery, where names such as Quashee (Sunday), Cudjo (Monday) and Cufee (Friday) were common.

Here is a list of weekday names in several languages: