One of my most nerdy thought spirals is thinking about calendars and time. I have already touched on my calendar fascination in some of my earlier posts, such as Fun with Time and The January Blues. In this post, I’m going to exclusively focus on the theme of the “month” and how months are named and organized. Basically, I have just been researching month facts and this post will be me sharing them in a semi-structured manner.
Simply put, a calendar is a system in which to measure the passing of time. The month is the second or third largest annual unit of time, depending if we count seasons or not. I think it’s just so interesting that the Global north’s minds and language are so attached to the concept of 12 months, and these 12 very specific months. The 12-month system does make sense as it is based on the fact that it stems from the moon (I mean that’s where the word month comes from) but it seems almost unnatural if one were to organize time in anything outside of this 12-month structure.
The naming of the English months an additionally interesting tale The calendar the global north uses, and that dominates the global understanding of “calendar”, is the Gregorian Calendar, which was used to replace the Julian Calendar in the 16th century, which was also 12 months and was developed by Julius Ceasar. Consequently, the modern entomology of months is based on The calendar used by the Romans had initially only had 10 months, with the year ending in December and beginning again in March, the time in between known simply as “Winter”. January and February were consequently added in order to make the 12-month system we have today. I find the entomology of each month interesting so here is a brief synopsis:
January - Named after the two-faced Roman god of time, beginnings and endings, and passages
February - Named after a Roman purification feast known as Februa
March - Named after the Roman god of war, Mars
April - From the Latin aperire which means “to open” (think leaves?)
May - Named After the Roman deity Maia, or earth mother.
June - Named after the Roman goddess Juno, the goddess of femininity and marriages (and Jupiter’s wife)
July - Named after Julius Ceasar
August - Named after Augustus Ceaser
September - the 7th month
October - the 8th month
November - the 9th month
December - the 10th month
The namesakes of the months, and thereby how we associate them with time is interesting. I love April’s “this happens in this month”. January’s two-faced symbolism is obviously an obsession of mine. I love the contrast of the back-to-back feminine goddesses in May and June next to the back-to-back real-world Roman emperors during May-August. And I find the namesakes of the “-ber”s not matching with their actual month of the year a hilarious blunder that persisted over time.
An astute reader may have noticed an inconsistency in this calindrical tale: “wait, if Julius Ceasar started the 12-month calendar, then what the heck was July called? Did he name a month after himself?”. Don’t worry, I too had this quandary…and I love what I discovered. The senate actually named July after Julius Ceasar the same year they murdered him in 44 BC! Crazy. August was named after Augustus when the emperor was still alive, which must have been an unreal experience. But then were these months called prior? Well, July and August followed the second half of the year’s number system - so they were originally Quintillis and Sextilis respectively. Ultimately what I discovered is that I want to start calling August, Sextilis, because it is a far more fun month name.
So all this calendar stuff got me thinking…does the whole world use the Gregorian Calendar? Is Julius Ceasar’s memory evoked every summertime? So did a little bit of investigating and will share two calendar findings.
The first is the Japanese month names. The calendar itself is the Gregorian calendar, but the roman naming system is not present. The names are simply as numerical as it gets. The first month of the year is not January in Japan, rather it is iichigatsu, or “month #1”. And it follows this pattern all the way through to Juunigatsu or “month #12”. This, however, was changed from the traditional japanese month names in the 18th century due to globalism. Here is an article that describes the original month names: but I do generally find it fascinating that whole chunks of time were considered something different not even 200 years ago.
The second international calendar I investigated was the Ethiopian Calendar. The Ethiopian Calendar is not linked to the Gregorian calendar at all and is one of the only modern civil calendars that operate outside of this system. The traditional Ethiopian calendar operates on a 13-month system that is 7 years behind the standard Gregorian. There are 12 months that are 30 days and then a small 5-day month. Additionally the Ethiopian New Year begins on the Gregorian September 11th (or 12th for a leap year). The reason that the calendar is 7 years behind is due to varying calculations for when Jesus Christ was born. I found this discovery so fascinating because it just shows that not all of the world operates under one single calendar, proving time is simply the most dominating of all social constructs.
This little rabbit hole then led me to something called which really got me going called the International Fixed Calendar (AKA the Cotsworth Plan, abv. IFC). The IFC was a suggested calendar reform in 1902 by British Calendar Scientist/accountant Moses B. Cotsworth. The IFC suggests that the Gregorian Calendar should be altered to fit a more modern version of time with mathematical consistency. The proposal called for 13 equal months of 28 days, with one epagomenal day (the calendar science term for day that does not belong to a month) called Year Day, which is to celebrate the beginning of the new year. The 13th month would be inserted between July and August and would be named Sol. There are several advantages to this system: each month has the exact same number of days and is exactly 4 weeks, this system also has 52 weeks each year without variation, and each year looks exactly the same! Perfect for someone who likes ordering and schedules. What I don’t necessarily like about this is system is that it means that holidays etc. are on the same day every year; imagine if your birthday always being on a Monday? Also the 13-month breakdown makes the year impossible to divide into easy quarters, which generally is also a nice thought. Why the IFC fascinates me so much is that it’s evidence that there really are people out there trying to change the calendar and that the calendar doesn’t have to be what it has been since the time of the Roman Empire. Radical stuff.
Ultimately this pondry hole has me thinking about, well, how efficiently organized our calendar is. You know that old tale that the reason we use the QWERTY keyboard is because it was organized in the least efficient manner in order to avoid jamming on old typewriters, but now that it’s so integrated into our systems there is no way we can change them? I wonder if that is the same with the Georgian Calendar that we use.
Overall the effort to measure time through months is a weird process, and it only gets weirder the more that one thinks about it.
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