kurt@fluke.UUCP (Kurt Guntheroth) (09/19/83)
There were originally 10 months in the roman calendar. Each month had 36 days and they had simple names indicating their ordinality (Look at September, October, November, December now). That is a total of 360 days ahd then they had 5 days for feasting around december or january somewhere. Somebody got tired of explaining the extra feasting days which didn't have a month (too hard for astronomers to explain to dumb emperors no doubt) so the days were allocated among the months. Comes now some emperors (Julius, Augustus) who want a month named after them. They created two new months (July and August) and inserted them after June (August after July because Augustus succeeded Julius) with days swiped from all the other months. That's why September (7th month) is in the ninth spot in the calendar. Now all months have either 30 or 31 days but the emperors are not satisfied. August only had 30 days and Augustus wanted 31. He swiped a day from poor defenseless February, leaving 29. The same thing happens later and Feb has 28. The remaining problem of the fact that the earth takes an extra 1/4 day to revolve about the sun was not solved successfully until 1570 or so (Look at the manual page for cal(1) if you want to know the exact date). By the way, there were uncounted other methods of telling months. Many were lunar. They had the charming property that they gained a year every 33 years when compared against a solar year. This made it difficult to explain seasons since you sometimes had a very cold summer. Actually soceities which used this system did not generally have months with names but only measured the relative temporal distance between events. "That was about 5 months (moons) ago."