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Is there a scientific calendar which uses a different reference than Jesus? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt's calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.

Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?

Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be "nice" because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.

Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

although August might have to be translated to the target language

Funnily enough, Augustus being a person's name¹, anybody that uses those same months will understand without translation.

1 - Well, ok, a personal title. Even more funnily, a claim of being god... that's completely independent from the one the OP is concerned about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is "serpen" by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is "ab" but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in "bayue" (lit. eight(th) month).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Wow I just realised something crazy. August in Ukrainian is серпень, while srpanj in Croatian is July. July in Ukrainian is липень, while lipanj in Croatian means June. I wonder why they're shifted like this...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Maybe for a similar reason that Oktoberfest is in September

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

And what is that reason?