OK, so in English years with 366 days apparently are jumpy, but I imagine that’s not what the name is supposed to mean. I have a couple of questions:
How do you say “leap year” in different languages?
Where does the name come from?
Do “leap days” have a name other than ‘February 29’ (well, its equivalent) in those same languages?
I’ll start.
In Spanish, año bisiesto, from Latin bisextus, “double-sixed”, and no.
In Catalan, any bixest or any de traspàs, “double-sixed” or “transfer year” (the word is the same as for selling a store or business; no idea why), and no.
A Jewish Leap Year, in which a thirteenth month is added to the calendar, is called “Shana M’Uberes” which literally means “pregnant (as in, extended like a pregnant woman’s belly) year”.
In Hungarian, it’s szökõév, which literally translates to “leap year.” According to the calendars for name days, the extraday is called szökõnap (“leap day”), but is marked on Feb. 24. Apparently, this is because of an old Roman custom.
In Polish, it’s rok przestępny. A leap day would be dzień przestępny. I’m not entirely sure of the definition of przestępny. I’m only familiar with that word in that particular phrase.
This was the Roman custom, and the origin of the word “bisextile”.
The Romans wrote dates by counting backwards from specific, fixed dates in the month. The first of each month was known as the Kalends, so March 1st = Kal. Mar. = “the kalends of March”. In normal years Feb. 24 is a. d. VI Kal. Mar. - “the sixth day before March 1st” (counting both end dates). But in leap years it would actually be the seventh–if Julius Caesar hadn’t decided that the leap day would be a. d. bis. VI Kal. Mar. - “the second-sixth day before March 1st” (remember, the counting was done backward from the target Kalends, so it’s technically correct to have the “second sixth” occur before the “first sixth”).
Slight hijack, but what is with the Romans and their strange counting schemes? Roman numerals work the same way, with letters added to the left of another letter to indicate subtraction and to the right to indicate addition. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how they were able to do even simple mathematical tasks like adding a column of numbers.
Do we have any record of who came up with this method of notation, and if there are any advantages over the system we use today of having a “ones” column, a “tens” column, etc.?
Roman numerals were based on tally marks that were originally notched into a stick; these are the “I”'s. When a count got to a multiple of 5, the counter made a double notch; this is where the “V” comes from. At multiples of 10 the counter would make a cross-cut “X”
So a stick with 12 tally marks would look like this: I I I I V I I I I X I I. The tallies are a relic of the running total, but it’s obvious that once the final total is reached most of the earlier marks can be omitted: the XII ending of the marks is all that’s required for “12” in the example. This principle was extended to include tallies that were “just short” of a V or X notch: If a stick read I I I I V I I I I, a “virtual” X was used to show the stick was “one short of X” = IX.
This seems odd and cumbersome to us only because we are used to writing out math problems for calculation. The Romans by contrast performed similar calculations with an abacus, which is much more conducive to the Roman numeral system.
One final point on the bisextile (before this thread is resurrected 4 years from now). The reason Caesar chose to double February 24th specifically in the Roman calendar is that’s the point in the older calendar where the priests would add extra months to re-adjust their lunar-based calendar with the seasons of the year. The reason the priests put the extra month there was related to the Roman festival Terminalia, held (typically) on February 23rd. Terminus was the god who protected boundary markers (an important job in an agricultural society; tampering with boundary markers is an easy way to steal a few extra acres of land, so it’s handy to have a superstitious fear to discourage it). It’s not hard to see his annual festival associated with a more general “boundary” of the solar year.
Ack! I didn’t even notice that. I just pressed down down the o key until I got my little character map and selected what I thought looked like the long umlaut. On my screen, it’s hard to tell that it’s a tilde. That said, I have seen Hungarians use that character when the long umlaut is not available.
Islam, oddly enough refuses the idea of a leap year. The Hejra Calendar is moon-based and so drifts around the seasons with wild abandon. In the Old Days, they used ad intracalendarial (intercalendarial?) days and even months, but Mohammed prohibited the practice.
When I arrived here, Ramadan was easy as it fell in December. Now it is right in August. No fun at all.
