Every year I'm reminded of the time I learned about Roman calendars

[conuly]

And their batshit, batshit counting down system with inclusive counting.

The 15th is the Ides of March, and the day before that is pridie Ides March, okay - and then the day before that is "three days before the Ides". Because thirteen, fourteen, fifteen makes three days. And they used that every time they wanted to find a date, counted backwards (inclusively!) from the next Kalends, Nones, or Ides.

It broke my brain then and I've never fully recovered.

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Comments

[austin_dern]

Yes, by the way, the slipping in of an extra month was meant to keep what started as a lunar calendar roughly in synch with the solar.

Maybe useful context is the Roman calendar started out not covering the whole year, just, like, the start of spring to the end of harvesting. So it was a calendar in the way, like, the baseball season has a calendar, with days that just don't matter. The days-that-don't-matter provided the padding needed to keep time as best as possible in synch with sun and moon, but once you try putting a name and number to every day you start having to make compromises, some of them more preposterous than others.

There'll be a time in several thousand years, due to precession of the Earth's orbit, that either the Gregorian Calendar, the idea of Easter as an early-spring (European) holiday, or the tie between Easter and the first full moon in spring has to be given up. Likely at least one of these will have been given up before the choice is required, but even so, there's constraints that can't all be met indefinitely.