The Calendar of Lorelei
Origins of the Calendar
It was after the events of what we now know as Cycle 525 that the peoples of Calmarendi started keeping proper historical records - or at least began to appreciate the importance of doing so - and, in Cycle 575, as part of that process, they formally adopted the standardized calendar that we know today as the Calendar of Lorelei, named in honour of Lorelei the Chronologer: Princess of Victoria. Details of her exact contributions to the codification of the calendar remain uncertain, for it was a collaborative effort involving mathematicians, archaeologists, astronomers and historians, as well as politicians, but it was most certainly her energy and determination which drove that collaboration and which was instrumental in securing the political consensus needed for its universal adoption across the whole of the Western Provinces.
On Monday, Week 1 of Spring 575 the Calendar of Lorelei officially became the calendar of the whole of human civilization on Calmarendi.
Weeks and Days of the Week
A Calendar Week
A calendar week is a period of seven consecutive days beginning on day one and running through to day seven. Unlike Earth’s Gregorian Calendar, in which the pattern of weeks is, effectively, only an overlay on top of the actual calendar, the week is one of the integral sub-divisions of the Calendar of Lorelei.
A Colloquial Week
Colloquially, a week - as a measure of time - is any period of seven consecutive days. But, if a thing is said to occur weekly then, although one may assume it is a thing that happens once in each calendar week, it may not, necessarily, be the same day each week.
Days of the Week
Days of the week, as well as being numbered one through seven, are named, correspondingly, Monday, Tuesday and so on through to Sunday, in exactly the way you may be familiar with (see table below) except that, in the Calendar of Lorelei, there is no ambiguity about which day is the first day of the week: it is Monday, a view of the calendar with which there is no dissent.
Festival Days
The days of Festival at the end of each Cycle, although referred to as week 51 of the the season of Onset, lie outside the regular pattern of weeks. They are not considered as “days of the week” and are never referred to by standard day of the week names.
History of the Seven Day Week
On Earth, the seven day week derives from the length of the four phases of the Moon. Now, although the matter of whether Calmarendi is orbited by any natural satellites of its own remains undefined, one may assume that if it is, the periodicity of any such celestial bodies is unlikely to fit well with the seven day week.
This being the case and the fact that the Calmarendian day names are the same as those used in the Anglophone cultures of Earth, both suggest that the concept of the week has been around since the time of the original settlers even if they got no further in agreeing a more comprehensive calendar.
Be that as it may, the true etymologies of the day names are lost to modern Calmarendians although much folk lore and many a Wanderer’s tale tell of how the days came to have the names they do. Perhaps some of these tales had their origins in Earth’s mythologies and legends but, if so, they have, over the centuries, morphed into a new mythology that is now quite unrecognizable.
Weekend
Weekly Days of Rest
Designated days of rest at the back end of each week - weekends - are days on which all labour not required for the real-time provision of essential goods, services and recreational opportunities shall cease until the start of the following week. There is an expectation that most people will have the opportunity, more often than not, to enjoy their weekends with family and friends, participate in community ventures or to simply indulging in purely frivolous activities and divertissements.
What constitutes “essential” labour is generally the subject of local negotiation between Governments and Trade Guilds, negotiations which are sometimes less than harmonious.
Short Weekend
Days six and seven (Saturday and Sunday) of every week are considered days of rest. On weeks where only Saturday and Sunday are rest days, the weekend is designated a Short Weekend.
Long Weekend
Every fifth week, when the week number is exactly divisible by five, day five (Friday) is designated an additional day of rest and becomes part of what is known as a Long Weekend.
Mid-Season and End-of-Season Weekends
Officially, an extra half-day of rest, the afternoon of day four (Thursday), is added to the weekends of Week 25 (the Mid-Season weekend) and Week 50. The latter is known, after the name of the week itself, as the Heliotrope weekend or, in season seven (Onset), as the Festival Weekend.
Observance
Whilst the Saturday and Sunday rest days are considered sacrosanct pretty much universally and the Trade Guilds remain steadfast in defence of the additional Fridays off work, observance of the Thursday afternoons is rather more flexible; there are many different arrangements in place according to the customs and needs of particular regions or sectors of industry. One popular variant is for the the half day of the Festival Weekend to be taken on the following Monday morning to allow everyone extra time to recover from the excesses of Festival.
Table: Days of the Week
Seasons and Weeks of the Season
Length of the Season
1 season = 50 weeks = 350 days
Weeks of the Season
The weeks of a season are numbered 1 through 50 and each also bears the name of a flower: the full list of names is given in the table below. These names, however, are rarely used officially or even colloquially save, on occasion, to name or give a nickname to a child born in a particular week though many, perhaps most, people do not know or remember what the names are (the week names, that is, not the names of their children).
Table: Weeks of the Season
NOTE: Entries in this table have not yet been finalized and are liable to change.
The Annual Cycle
Length of the Cycle
1 cycle = 7 seasons + Festival = 2,454, 2,457 or 2,458 days
Orbital Period
The orbital period (that is, the time it takes Calmarendi to complete one orbit of Cal A) is exactly 2,454.43 Calmarendian days. This period is referred to colloquially as a cycle. Seasons, as the principle subdivisions of the annual cycle (note that the concept of a "month" does not exist), mark passage through the cyclic weather patterns of the world. Although Calmarendi has an almost negligible axial tilt of just under 0.05 radians , the planet's highly elliptical orbit still gives each season its characteristic weather disposition albeit change comes slowly compared to Earthly seasons.
The Calendary Cycle
Definition
By strict definition, a cycle is one complete pass through the annual calendar and is not be confused with the planetary orbital period of 2,454.43 days.
Subdivision of the Cycle
The calendar cycle comprises the seven fixed length seasons of 350 days plus a Festival period of variable duration at the end of each cycle which, over time, exactly makes up the extra 4.43 days. The seasons are numbered one through seven and correspondingly named Midwinter, Thaw, Spring, Perihelion, High Summer, Autumn and Onset. Unlike the weeks, seasonal names are almost always used in day-to-day communications in preference to the numbers.
Start of the Cycle
The calendar is rooted on the aphelion of the Calmarendian orbit: the point at which the planet is furthest from Cal A. Aphelion heralds the start of the Midwinter season and the beginning of a new calendar cycle. Although the exact moment of aphelion always occurs during Festival (varying, cycle-by-cycle, from around lunch-time on the preantepenultimate day of Festival right up to a minute before midnight on the last), the first day of Midwinter (Monday of Week 1 of Midwinter) is always New Cycle Day.
Colloquial Summer
The words "summer", when used without qualification, and "summertime" generally refer to the period covered by the seasons of Perihelion and High Summer but can, more vaguely, refer to the extended period from late Spring to early Autumn, more commonly known as the "cricket season". It can be very confusing, especially when people start using "summer", incorrectly, as a shorthand for the specific season of High Summer.
Colloquial Winter
The words "winter" and "wintertime" generally refer to the period covered by the seasons of Onset, Midwinter and Thaw.
Festival
Festival is a variable length period of days added to the end of Onset to bring the average cycle length up to 2,454.43 days. Festival is officially designated as the fifty-first week of Onset but is culturally regarded as a time outside the calendar between week 50 of Onset and week 1 of Midwinter. Colloquially and officially, its days are always referred to as Festival One, Festival Two and so on rather than Monday, Tuesday, etc.
As the name suggests, Festival is a holiday period celebrated with much feasting and merriment. All but the most essential labour ceases for the duration.
The length of Festival is determined by the divisibility of the Cycle number: if it is not divisible by seven then Festival is four days long; if it is divisible by 700, Festival is eight days long; otherwise, Festival is seven days long.
Eras
Records of events prior to those of cycle 525 were patchy at best and all the more so the further back in time historians tried to delve such that almost nothing is known for certain about (the timing of) events prior to the beginning of what we now know as the sixth century. Hence dates earlier than Monday of Week 1 of Midwinter 501 (501-1-01-1 CE) are referred to as Before History (BH) and everything on or after this date as Current Era (CE).
Going even further back, anything that happened before Monday of Week 1 of Midwinter 1 (001-1-01-1 BH) is referred to (when it is referred to at all) as Before Time Zero (BZ).
See also: History of Calmarendi
Date Formatting
Colloquialized
The format used for expressing a date in everyday communications, both written and verbal, is:
where:
Thus, for example, Sunday of Week 7 of Onset 777 is the seventh day or the seventh week of the seventh season of the 777th cycle.
In formal written communications, the first "of" (that between the day name and week number) might be replaced by a comma - for example: Tuesday, Week 17 of Onset 776.
In casual conversation the season name and/or the cycle number might be omitted where they are easily inferred. So, for example, "He'll be leaving for Port Victoria on Tuesday of Week seventeen" would be considered entirely correct in circumstances where all parties to the conversation already understand which season and cycle are inferred.
Festival
The format for dates of Festival Days is:
where day is the cardinal number of the festival day. In all cases, the cycle number is written and spoken the same as for any other date but the day number can be written as a digit or spelled out, according to taste. Thus, for example, the fourth day of Festival during Jennifer's sojourn on Calmarendi can be written as Festival 4 of 777 or Festival Four of 777.
Common Symbolic Notation
Sometimes, it makes more sense, especially when tabulating and sorting dates, to express them in a numeric format. For this purpose the following standard is used:
where:
By way of example, Sunday of week 7 of Onset 777 is displayed as 777-7-07-7 CE.
For Festival dates, the season number is given as 7 and the week number as 51, even though, officially, Festival days lie outside the normal structure of seasons and weeks, thus Festival 4 of 777 is displayed as 777-7-51-4 CE.
In general day-to-day usage, Common Symbolic Notation is often referred to as All Numeric Notation, even though, clearly, it is not (officially) an "all numeric" format. However, the simple fact is that most Calmarendians, even when being "formal", do not trouble themselves with the era marker which is regarded as entirely superfluous. This arises from the common belief that dates prior to Time Zero (in a time when it is supposed that there were not any humans on Calmarendi) simply do not exist. Furthermore, as there is no ambiguity, in pure numeric form, between Current Era dates and Before History dates (when they are needed at all, which generally they are not) for all such dates exist in the seamless range of cycles from Cycle 1 to whenever, the era marker adds no information that is not implied by the numbers themselves.
Abbreviated Day Names
Sometimes it is desirable, necessary or simply more convenient to write abbreviated day names rather than the full name or just the day number. There are three conventions in common use: short, shorter and shortest.
- Short Day Names The short form of a day name is the first three characters of the full name, so “Mon” for Monday, “Tue” for Tuesday and so on.
- Shorter Day Names The shorter form of a day name is the first two characters of the full name, so “Mo” for Monday, “Tu” for Tuesday and so on.
- Shortest Day Names The shortest form of a day name is just the first character of the full name, so “M” for Monday, “T” for Tuesday and so on, except “Th” for Thursday and “Su” for Sunday in order to (partly) avoid ambiguity. Because of the ambiguity, this is a format that should not be used in preference to the short or shorter forms unless space on the page is at a premium.
- Festival Days For festival days, the short form of the pseudo day name is the day number prefixed with the math letter omega, thus: Ω.n. Where shorter or shortest forms are being used for ordinary day names, the dot in the middle is dropped and is often not used in any event. Omega was chosen to represent Festival on account of Festival days being the last of the calendar cycle.
Other Conventions
Time Zero
Time Zero is the stroke of midnight at the beginning of Cycle One.
Before Time Zero
Popular View
Mathematics and popular ideology do not agree upon how dates prior to Time Zero should be represented.
The view of the general populace and, indeed, of learned historians is that humans did not arrive on Calmarendi until sometime after the beginning of Cycle One. This, as it happens, is (almost) entirely correct but the conclusion drawn less so: that, before Cycle One, nothing happened. Beliefs hold that either the world had simply not existed at all prior to this or that it had been there, unchanged and unchanging, for countless millennia. Whichever school of thought you subscribe to, there were no events to which one might reasonably assign dates and therefore dates prior to Cycle Zero are not necessary; dates prior to Cycle Zero do not exist.
This, of course, is arrant nonsense but because it has no consequences in day-to-day life, the belief (or convention, if you will) persists largely unchallenged.
Cycle Zero
Amongst sensible people, however, there is, conceptually, a Cycle Zero. This is the cycle deemed to have immediately preceded Cycle One and which ran from Monday of Week 1 of Midwinter 0 (000-1-01-1 BZ) to Festival 8 of 0 (000-7-51-8 BZ).
Before Cycle Zero
The cycle before Cycle Zero is denoted as Cycle One Before Time Zero (001 BZ), the cycle before that as Cycle Two Before Time Zero (002 BZ) and so on, regressing as far back as may be required.
Century
A century (sometime referred to more fully as a Century of Cycles), although not an official term within the definition of the Calendar of Lorelei, is always taken to mean a period of one hundred cycles. The seven fold scale factor in comparison to an Earthly century goes some way, perhaps, to illustrate just how slowly life changes on Calmarendi.
Notwithstanding that there is, conceptually, a Cycle Zero, the definition of the zero point in the calendar being the moment of the beginning of Cycle One means there is no ambiguity or dissent about when a numbered Century of Cycles begins; there was no false logic brought to bear to persuade anyone that, for example, the beginning of Cycle 700 marked the start of the Eight Century; everyone understands that the end of Cycle 700 marked the end of the Seventh Century.
The Grand Cycle
The Grand Cycle is the length of time it takes before the pattern of the calendar (that is, the variable number of days in each cycle's Festival) begins to repeat, namely 700 cycles. By convention, the period from 001-1-01-1 BH to 700-7-51-8 CE is taken to be Grand Cycle 1. Under this scheme, the current cycle (777) would be known as Cycle 77 of Grand Cycle 2. It should, however, be noted that such notation enjoys no favour in officialdom, academia or daily Calmarendian life.
A major point to note with this particular notation is that in every grand cycle, the cycle numbers run forward from 1 to 700 both before and after Time Zero. So, for example, Cycle Zero is notated as Cycle 700 of Grand Cycle 0; Cycle 12 BZ (Cycle minus 12) as Cycle 688 of Grand Cycle 0.
For more information about how and why we use Grand Cycle Notation in the real world, see Collating Calmarendian Dates,
Absolute Season Reference
A season's absolute reference (ASR) is its sequence number relative to Time Zero with Season 1 being Midwinter of Cycle 1.
Absolute Day Reference
A day's absolute reference (ADR) is its sequence number relative to Time Zero with Day 1 being Monday of Week 1 of Midwinter 1.
Apocalypse Reckoning
The period during which Jennifer was on Calmarendi is often, informally, called The Apocalypse. Apocalypse Reckoning is that period's count of days with AR Day 1 being the day on which Jennifer and Colette arrived on Calmarendi.
Earth Calendar Dates
In any context where Calmarendian dates and Earth dates may be confused with one another, you might see a letter E prepended to an all numeric (ISO-8601) Earth date. Thus, for example, Jennifer's date of birth might be shown as E 1950-09-24. This is, however, entirely optional because, even if it is not obvious from context, the two formats are sufficiently different to be easily distinguished.
Software Implementation
A Python package that can validate and manipulate Calmarendian dates - including converting between various date formats - is being developed. The latest version of the source code can be found on GitHub. It is an open source project: feel free to contribute.
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