sigmaleph | (no subject)

the temptation for me when worldbuilding a calendar is always to fix all the weird things that stand out from our calendar, but I think (this time at least) I should explicitly go the other direction and make it more clearly fucked up. leap days can be added at the end of any month according to political will, and this power is abused for obscure tax reasons. major religions have similarly-named high holy days based on the solstices but compute them differently and are competing for who gets to set the date for the official festivities. every once in a while they need to add or get rid of an entire month just so the seasons can even sort of line up. there's a calendar counting from the founding of the city and a different one that names ~10-20 year periods based on who was the seniormost noble in the council and one has 15 more years than the other. the historians are pretty sure that the terms of Ralai and Makasin overlapped but deciding who was actually in charge at that point is politically fraught and they can't publish the corrections, plus there's at least another three years unaccounted for anyway. the astronomers are crying.

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Historians aren't entirely sure who suggested that the week be eight days long, but given the context, they are fairly confident they were trolling.

(I'm pretty sure there are, like, two things you've listed, tops, that HAVEN'T been the case in our system.)

There are two fringe religions, each of which has their own, completely separate calendar system. One of those systems doesn't alight itself to the solar year and so their years increase at a different rate.

yeah I'm sure each of these or something very similar has happened in history somewhere and some i've deliberately borrowed. 'fucked up' is the natural state of calendars, so why not lean into that for worldbuilding

It's honestly astonishing to me that we DON'T (as far as I know?) have two different week-cycles in our society. Seven is a completely arbitrary number, and just imagine if there were two different dominant systems that we had to navigate between as a global society.

According to tvtropes, that most reliable and scholarly source, the main reason the seven-day week sticks around is that men with beards want to trim them on the same day every week, and seven days is apparently the optimal amount of time to wait.