Starting a new calendar - when do we count from?

13 months in a year. The first twelve months have 28 days, the last month has 29 days, or 30 in a leap year. Months always begin on sunday. Always. The “extra” day or two at the end of the year are outside of the normal week, they have no weekday associated with them. If you must, you can refer to it as “Extraday” or something similar.

As for new names, we can use astronimical names for weekdays, with a few modifications. Sunday and monday (moonday) are fine, as is saturday (Saturnday). Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday are explicitly named after pagan gods, so we need new names. Tuesdays can become Jupday (for Jupiter), Wednesday becomes Venday (for Venus) and Friday becomes Nepday (for Neptune). As for the months, I’m still working on it…

I probably wouldn’t do much more than rearrange the names a bit so that SEPTember is actually the 7th month, OCTober is the 8th, NOVember is the 9th, and DECember is the 10th.

The first day of the calendar should be May 28, 585 BC (our style). This would make this the year 2596.

The significance of this date was that the Battle of Halys was fought between the Medes and Lydians. And there was a solar eclipse during the battle. This makes the Battle of Halys the earliest event in human history which we can precisely date.

The American Calendar (aka the “America–Fuck Yeah!” (AFY) calendar):

Five months, starting with Independence Day 1776, 73 days in each month, each named after an American Indian tribe.

  1. Iroquois (July 4-Sept 14)
  2. Chickasaw (Sep 15-Nov 26)
  3. Dakota (Nov 27-Feb 7)
  4. Navajo (Feb 8-Apr 21)
  5. Ottawa (Apr 22-Jul 3)

We would be in the year 235 AFY; today would be the 13th of Chickasaw.

I’d have the calendar begin with the origin of the Universe. Of course, I don’t know what day that would make today, but surely Jesus could find out for us. See, it’s objective and we learn something. :slight_smile:

The 11-digit years would be cumbersome, of course, but those could be abbreviated it to the last four digits for common usage (in the way that we have no problem abbreviating our four-digit years to two in many contexts). So if this happened to be the year 13730142011, we could still call it '2011 in most non-scientific contexts.

No opinion on the smaller calendar divisions.

I’ve refined my weekday names a bit. The seven days of the week will be named after the seven heavenly bodies that were known to the ancients: The Sun, The Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The names will be Sunday, Monday, Merday, Venday, Marday, Juday, and Saturday.

As for when the calendar starts, any year we pick will be completely arbitrary, so I’m just going to drop the pretenses and pick a completely arbitrary year. The calender will start exactly 4000 years prior to our current year (2011 AD on the Gregorian calendar). This is far enough back that most of recorded history is on the “plus side” of the starting point. The calender will have an explicit year zero, and any events before this will have a negative year.

As for the names of the months, I’m still working on it. We could use Zodiac signs (I’d need a 13th sign, but isn’t there a 13th Zodiac sign that normally gets ignored?)

14th July 1789