Talk:Lunar calendar

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—Yamara ✉ 22:07, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

Question: If the Islamic calander can not be used to determine season then how do farmers sow the seeds in different Islamic countries.

Today I can understand they can use the Gregorian calendar because both are available, but how was the situation a centuries back?

Any idea?

In Egypt, the Egyptian (Coptic) solar calendar never stopped to be used by farmers, including muslim farmers. In the Middle, East both the Hebrew lunisolar calendar (derived from the Babilonian calendar) and the Julian solar calendar (derived from a mix up old the Roman lunisolar calendar and the Egyptian solar calendar) have alwasy been in commonin use beside the Islamic lunar calendar. Curiously, some Arab country traditionally use the Hebrew month names for naming the corresponding Julian months. 194.176.201.27 (talk) 11:39, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea what was actually used, but do have ideas about possible ways. For example one could reckon the same time of solar year to occur 11 days later next lunar year. If this puts that date into the next month of the lunar year one works it out as though the month had 30 days. About once every 21 lunar years it would need to b 12 days later rather than 11 days later.

Example:

  9 Safar 1426,  20 Safar 1427,  1 Rabi I 1428,
12 Rabi I 1429, 23 Rabi I 1430, 4 Rabi II 1431,
etc..

Karl 3 November 2005 (UT)

It has been suggested that the article Lunar year which is about a 12-month lunar year be merged with this article. I point out that a lunar calendar can in principle have a year of any number of months or no year at all. If the need to merge is very strong, I'd suggest placing its own contents in a section headed 'Lunar Year or 12 Month Lunar Year. Also the article links Lunar Year when mentioning the Islamic Calendar.

I'm happy for the articles to remain separate.

Karl Palmen 8 September 2006 09:10 UT

[edit] Non-Islamic use?

Are there any examples of a purely lunar calendar besides the Islamic calendar? The article would be greatly improved if we had some. If other examples don't exist, I'm not quite sure what the purpose of this article would be.--Pharos 18:28, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

At least another example exist: the so-called "Lunar series" used in the Mayan calendrical system. That was a special-purpose calendar (possibly used to calculate lunar ellipses) composed of *six* lunar months. Adding this example would also be good to make the point that, in a lunar calendar, what really matters is the month length, while the "year" is just an arbitrary number of months collected together. This is opposed to the solar calendar, where what really matters is the duration of the year, and "months" are just arbitrary internal subdivision of the year (in fact, there are solar calendards with 19 19-days months, or 18 20-days months, but they all result in 365 and a quarted days per year). 194.176.201.24 (talk) 11:27, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Old English 13-month lunar year" section

The section titled "Old English 13-month *lunar* year" does not make sense, because that calendar acually was *not* a lunar, calendar but rather a *solar* calendar with an anusual internal subdivision (13 four-week periods plus 1 day, totalling *365* days!). And, once you have corrected the error and turned it to "Old English 13-month *solar* year", it doesn't belong in this article anymore... So, if everybody agrees (or I have no answers within a few days), I will correct that "lunar" intto "solar" and move the whole section in the "Solar calendar" article. 194.176.201.24 (talk) 11:29, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

The only reason for not moving it would be if it was ever called a lunar year or its months called lunar months in the historical record, rightly or wrongly. However, the present section does not support that possibility. — Joe Kress (talk) 21:02, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
Even if that was the case, in this article it would suffice to leave just a short note about the weird denomination, with a link to the proper article. 151.47.164.116 (talk) 12:41, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Clarification

This is a good, informative article, but I think the "Length of the Lunar Month" section needs a little more clarification. I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out what exactly those numbers were supposed to mean, and how one could "use" them, and couldn't figure the latter out at all. My mother couldn't make heads or tails of it, either. We normal people need a little more explanation, please! 70.212.131.245 (talk) 20:20, 26 May 2008 (UTC)