Talk:Gregorian calendar/Archive 2

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Something is fishy here, church wouldn't approve 10 day slip!

> A deletion of ten days was made, when switching to the Gregorian calendar.

Looks unbelievable. The church would never do that. The Bible says God created the world in six days and rested on the 7th. If the first sunday mass after the reform would not be exactly seven sunset and seven sunrises after the last sunday mass held before the reform, it would be invalid, because that would not be on the seventh day any more. <--> Jesus himself established the celebration of the day right after sabbath, on every seventh day.

Thus, if the ten day slip is true, in fact all "sunday masses" held since the reform are fake and invalid and it looks like hundreds of millions of people, who got null and void communions, are burning in hell just because of this mistake by the catholic church. Plain impossible.

If the church had to reform the calendar, it would definitely wait a little longer, until the difference becomes exactly two weeks and switch then, so the first Sunday Mass held after the reform would still be exactly (N x 7) days after Jesus Christ established the Sunday. Why would the RC church run to make a 10 day switch, when it already had 1-1/2 millenia behind its back? They could wait a few centuries more.

Did anyone honestly investigate this issue? I think if true, this must be the true reason the orthodox christians stick with the old calendar, not the western papal - eastern autokefal authority clash.

Thanks for your attention, Sincerely: Tamas Feher "etomcat@freemail.hu"

The ten-day slip is true. But you're also right that the church did not want to interfere with the 7-day cycle of the week, so that cycle was not changed: Thursday October 4, 1582 (Jul) was followed by Friday October 15, 1582 (Greg). The last sunday mass in the Julian calendar was on Sunday Sep 30; the first in the new calendar was Sunday Oct 17; these dates were precisely 7 days apart.
So this means that the day of the week was the same in both calendars for a certain day, but not for a certain date (e.g. October 15 1582 was a Monday in the Julian calendar, but a Friday in the Gregorian). Eugene van der Pijll 20:50, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Except in Alaska, which switched sides of the International Dateline and therefore had 48 consecutive hours of the same day of the week.

Alaska was not a British colony when the dates changed in the British Empire, you are presumably talking about a different time and the change from the Russian Orthodox calendar to the Gregorian calendar. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:21, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Slowing of the earth and the effects of global warming on same

This statement was made:

However, recent evidence suggests that melting of glaciers (resulting from global warming) may create sufficient movement of water from high altitudes to the oceans to reverse the slowing, to satisfy the law of conservation of angular momentum.

It lacks a citation. I believe that's because it is nonsense: as glaciers melt, water is more evenly distributed over the globe, so there is more water around the equator than there was before, so to maintain the same angular momentum, the earth would have to slow even more, not speed up. (You can do the old spin-in-your-chair-and-put-your-legs-out test if you've forgotten what moving mass away from the axis of revolution does to rotational speed.) I believe one of the guidelines for editing is "Be Bold," so I am going to remove the above comment, since it seems obviously false to me. My apologies if my physics has failed me. If you add it again, maybe go find a reference this time.

Pqrstuv (talk) 03:04, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Because the editor used altitude, not latitude, he may have thought that the transfer of water from high altitude melting mountain glaciers to low altitude oceans would speed up Earth's rotation. Unfortunately, it is not the location of mass relative to sea level (or the center of the Earth) but its distance from Earth's axis which influences Earth's rate of rotation. So even though the melt water spreads out as a thin sheet over the oceans, more of that sheet would end up in tropical oceans that are much further from the axis than the orginal glaciers, most of which are in Alaska or Patagonia.
The "recent evidence" is Jean O. Dickey et al., "Recent Earth Oblateness Variations: Unraveling Climate and Postglacial Rebound Effects" Science 298 (2002) 1975-77 (discussed at Earth's bulging waistline blamed on glaciers, oceans) and associated American Geophysical Union articles. These authors state that Earth's J2 oblateness increased (flatter poles, bulging equator) beginning 1997/98, requiring them to propose plausible causes, which included ice/water transfer. Although they never state that the oblateness increase should have increased Earth's slowdown rate, that would indeed be the result.
Nevertheless, since 1972 the length-of-day (LOD) has been getting smaller, hence Earth's rotation has been speeding up ("Prediction of universal time and LOD variations"PDF (1.28 MB)). That file implies that the speedup is due to the transfer of core angular momentum. This speedup would need to continue for another decade or more before a negative leap second would be needed (UTC follows TAI). — Joe Kress (talk) 07:43, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Beginning of year

This section details changes made before the Gregorian Calendar was adopted. Should this infomation be elsewhere? Also the table of new year change date may be mistaken by a careless reader to be table of Gregorian Calendar adoption dates. I think the table should be moved elsewhere such as Julian Calendar or New year.

Karl 27 Oct 2005

The table and text are mine. I put it here to show that the Gregorian calendar did not change the beginning of the year to January 1 as many think. It shows that most Western European countries had already adopted January 1 as the first day of the numbered year before the Gregorian calendar was promulgated. "Careless readers" should be disuaded by a caption at the head of the table such as "Adoption of January 1 as beginning of year". — Joe Kress 02:27, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

A table that only shows the dates that various countries adopt 1 January new year fails to make this point. I'll may add a column to show the Gregorian calendar adoption date the different or not between the two would demonstrate the point.

Karl 28 Oct 2005

To Oz1cz: I gather you disagree with Mike Spathaky since don't think Denmark and Sweden changed the beginning of their numbered year to January 1 at the same time that Prussia did (1559). Furthermore, you give an extremely early date for Denmark (between 1300 and 1349), but don't think that Sweden changed at the same time. Are you sure that you are not inadvertently refering to the period when it named January 1 its New Year's Day? The two are not the same. I remember reading a source that had its earliest year about 1450, but nothing earlier. What is your source? — Joe Kress 06:15, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
My source is a Danish book, namely R.W. Bauer: "Calender for Aarene fra 601 til 2200", which is a major source for calendar information about Denmark. It is old (first published in 1868) but it has been reprinted several times later (in 1993 as ISBN 87-7423-083-2).
Here is what that books says: "Denmark usually began the year at Christmas, although also 1 January and 12 August have been used. In the library of Strasbourg there is an old almanac written in runes in which the year starts on 1 January. From the beginning of the 14th century the beginning of the year has always been 1 January."
The book also claims that 1 January has been the start of the year in Sweden since the beginning of the 16th century. I missed that yesterday when I updated the page, so it didn't make it into the table.
--Oz1cz 22:28, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
This article states; "The Ancient Romans had begun their years on 1 January." Yet the Roman calendar article states otherwise; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#History_of_the_calendar It shows that in 713BCE the months January and February were added to the end of the year after December. This position also explains the use of September(7) October(8) November(9) and December(10) as the names of those months. They were named based on their ordinal position from March the beginning of the year.
--User:Strider22 2007-11-13 —Preceding comment was added at 05:08, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
According to Bonnie Blackburn & Leofranc Holford-Strevens (see References in article) page 6, "New Year's Day. Although the Romans knew that their year had originally begun with *March, the name Ianuarius is not appropriate to an eleveth month; the New Year festivites seem too well entrenched to have been moved in historical times, and if the first written account of the Roman calendar, put on public display in the temple of Hercules and the Muses c.179 BC…had indicated a March beginning, our sources must have told us, such was the Romans' interest in their calendar...." I take this to mean that the change from a March new year to a January new year occured in prehistoric times, and by the time the Gregorian calendar was adopted in the middle ages, Rome considered 1 January to be New Year's Day. --Gerry Ashton 14:08, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

I think there's a lot of confusion about this, which I'm not totally able to clear up. There is evidence (Samuel Pepys' diary) that English people believed Jan 1 to be the start of the year. I think there's too much bland acceptance that 25 March was New Year's Day (in England at least). This would make a rather strange calendar in practice. Can anyone produce a calendar that shows this??? Is this rather a minor tradition existing alongside the calendar year - like our current financial/fiscal year - that has been preserved by antiquarian, eccentric interest to the extent that in presentation of the issue it distorts the reality of the case? Doesn't it seem to be true that the Roman tradition of starting the year on Jan 1 has continued to the present day?--Jack Upland (talk) 10:31, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

The article Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 explains that the start of the year was a matter of law. Of course, by 1750 England was an important trading nation, so many people would have used January 1 while dealing with foreign trading partners. I vaguely reading that there was some sort of New Year celebration on January 1, despite the fact that March 1 was the legal new year. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 19:39, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I have a strong suspicion that we approach the concept of New Year's date in a much too rigid fashion. Living in the 21st century, we are accustomed to governements and standardisation bodies laying down strict rules for all kinds of things. I think it highly likely that the the concept of New Year's day was much more fluid and ill-defined a few hundred years ago, with different regions, different organisations and even different people celebrating New Year and bouncing the year count at various dates. Is it not, perhaps, a mistake to claim rigidly that nation X changed to 1 January in the year Y? Does the table in the article actually give a wrong impression of something fixed, when, in fact, things were quite fuzzy? (Or am I making no sense at all?) --Oz1cz (talk) 08:08, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

You've got a point, but you're exaggerating it. They did have laws, bureaucracy etc. After all there was an Act of Parliament to change the legal situation. The point is that just as we have different definitions of the year (fiscal, financial, tax, school, church etc) so did they. Do we have any record of people celebrating New Year in March??? Do we have any evidence that people considered the "legal year" as the "calendar year"? In fact, the articleCalendar (New Style) Act 1750 cited above quotes the Parliament saying the 24 March start "differs ... from the common usage throughout the whole kingdom" i.e. the legal year was not used for everyday purposes.--Jack Upland (talk) 20:38, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
Jack is essentially correct. The primary source of confusion is that the modern calendar year is the same as the modern numbered year. Calendar year means the order in which the months are displayed. This has been January through December since at least the time of the Decemvirs in 450 BC (Roman Republican calendar c.60 BC). This order did not change during the Middle Ages even though the first day of the numbered year in Western Europe was March 25 (Anunciation), Easter-Eve (in France), or December 25 (Christmas). These days were celebrated as solemn religious 'festivals', not as New Year's Day. The beginning of the calendar year was called New Year's Day, at least in England, and was celebrated as a merry New Year's festival. In French, étrennes means a New Year's gift.
A good medieval calendar is the Brandeis Book of Hours (in Latin, 15th century, Flemish). Its calendar is on pages 1r-12v in the order January to December (half month per page). A transcript of all its calendar pages is in the Kalendarium. The history of exchanging gifts on the Kalends of January, New Year's Day, is in Past presents: New year's gifts at the Valois courts, CA. 1400 by Brigitte Buettner. This New Year's celebration is the subject of the January illumination of the most famous medieval manuscript of all, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (the very rich hours of the Duke of Berry, c.1416).
Reginald Poole mentioned a similar exchange of gifts on New Year's Day by King Henry the VIII and his court, so it was officially sanctioned in both England and France. France finally merged its two official years by legally adopted New Year's Day as the beginning of its numbered year on January 1, 1564, well before it implemented the Gregorian calendar on December 20, 1582. England was a little late, not merging its two official years until it recognized New Year's Day as the start of its numbered year on January 1, 1752, only a few months before it implemented the Gregorian calendar on September 14, 1752. — Joe Kress (talk) 02:35, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

"Essentially correct" or totally correct? Sorry, but it's a valid question.--Jack Upland (talk) 08:24, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

I have just come across this page that says "Nepal New Year's Day: 14 Apr 07". I suppose for many cultures around the globe the new year and the calendar year still do not coincide. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:27, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
That's from the Nepal Sambat, a lunar calendar. Rosh Hashanah, Islamic New Year and Chinese New Year are better-known lunar New Years. jnestorius(talk) 14:13, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry but that's totally irrelevant and totally intellectually uninteresting. The earth revolves around the sun. Hence the year. There is no cosmic starting point...--Jack Upland (talk) 09:48, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Riots

Can anyone tell what the citation is for this?

Four years later, someone running for a seat in Parliament used the campaign slogan "Give us back our eleven days!", which created false stories of riots at the change-over.

Every source I can find seems to confirm that there were actually riots (including deaths in Bristol). KWH 07:49, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Actually, historical researchers combing through contemporary newspapers haven't been able to find such riots. Most of this seems to have come from a Hogarth painting of ca. 1755 which depicts a heavily-contested parliamentary election in which the calendar issue was one of the slogans dragged in to attack the incumbent. I've added a thumbnail to the article page. Churchh 15:56, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
Added further info on the parliamentary election, and Hogarth's depiction of it. Churchh 22:13, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't buy the "no riots" argument at all. How does Hogarth's painting clear up the case? Why would an election slogan like that give the impression of riots? Yes, we should provide evidence of riots, but this simplistic argument against them doesn't wash. Unfortunately riots by their nature are not well documented...--Jack Upland (talk) 10:19, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

'Give us our eleven days!': calendar reform in eighteenth-century England in Past & Present, November, 1995 by Robert Poole looks at this in detail and concludes that it is a myth (see Page 4). I think a paragraph stating that in an article written by PP for P&P looks at all the evidence for riots and concludes that "[i]t can be asserted with confidence that the calendar riots are a myth. ... it seems to have developed, by accretion as it was turned to different purposes." If anyone can find an other reliable source then we can date the Past & Present article and add a "however in 2007 John Doe writing in a journal of history found there was evidence of rioting over the change of date in mousehole (or wherever) --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 19:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Sure, we should acknowledge his view but some of his argumentation is suspect:
Here [in the satirical journal, the World] we find evidence of "apprehension" and "clamour", but surely rather more evidence of the World's superior variety of satire, and of the cultural condescension of a confident Hanoverian elite.
The only eighteenth-century source for actual riots is Hogarth's famous print "An Election Entertainment", issued in February 1755, more than four years after the calendar reform Act was passed and more than two years after it was implemented.
In the first paragraph he really evades this issue. There was "clamour". Couldn't there have been riots? In the second paragraph, he is grasping at straws. Four or two years isn't long at all - and certainly isn't significant discussing pre-20th Century history.
In the rest of the article he provides abundant evidence of the practical inconvenience of the calendar reform (in government, business, agriculture etc) and of its unpopularity (including "sharp practices" which resulted in people actually losing their 11 days due. Since the populace rioted regularly in this period (e.g. the Gordon riots) isn't it reasonable to think there would have been riots about this too? Of course it is hard to prove a negative (no riots) but the article actually makes them sound likely.--Jack Upland (talk) 08:59, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
What you are suggesting is original research. This article is a verifiable reliable source that states the riots did not happen. To state that they did one would need a verifiable source that stated that riots did occur due to the calendar change. If found then one can construct a paragraph that states In 19xx XYZ states that after reviewing the evidence no riotting occurred because of the calendar change, but a more recent article by ABC contradicted this assertion and found that riotting had indeed occurred in Manchester and where ever. Until then we can simply add the part up before the ", but ...".--Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 12:25, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

I haven't done any "original research" (shock, horror) on the issue. I merely point out that the article doesn't state definitively that no riots took place. It argues that there is no proof of such riots, but then shows there was much public discomfort with the change (i.e. logically no proof but plenty of evidence). It would be better to state that it has been generally believed that there were riots (numerous sources cited in the article) but this article disputes that.--Jack Upland (talk) 09:32, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Corrections & question

I have made various corrections and tweaks. If anyone has a problem with this, please ask.
What is the meaning behind the blue marking of Lorraine and Nova Scotia?
Str1977 (smile back) 18:28, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Gregorian calendar#Timeline: It looks like those two areas were unique in that they adopted the Gregorian calendar, but then went back to the Julian calendar for a period of time before finally and permanently switching over to the Gregorian calendar. -- Jim Douglas (talk) (contribs) 18:37, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Almost unique. Sweden did some funny business, too, tho not exactly the same.
And didn't it involve only part of Nova Scotia? --Hordaland (talk) 10:51, 1 February 2008 (UTC)