Calendar reform

From Free net encyclopedia

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

Reformers cite several problems with the Gregorian calendar:

It is not perpetual. Each year starts on a different day of the week, and calendars expire every year.
Months are not equal in length, requiring the mnemonic rhyme, "Thirty days hath September…" to remember which month is 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long.
It is difficult to determine the weekday of any given day of the year.
The year’s four quarters are not equal. Business quarters that are equal would make accounting easier.
Its epoch (origin) is not religiously neutral. The same applies to month and weekday names in many languages.

1 Perpetual calendars
2 13-month calendar proposals
3 Naming proposals
4 See also
5 Specific proposals
6 External links

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.

But these calendars have the disadvantage of not counting certain days in the calendar week (the 365th day, and the 366th leap year day) in order to keep the calendar perpetual. This practice modifies the 7-day week, something that has caused religious groups to oppose these reforms in the past. Such concerns prevented the World Calendar from being adopted widely in the 1950s.

Some calendar reform ideas, such as the Pax 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.

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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 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.

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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).

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