History: Calendar Proposals

The canonical Lojban calendric system(s) are discussed in http://www.opoudjis.net/lojbanbrochure/lessons/less5days.html ; they are number-based. (January = pavmast., Sunday = nondjed.)

The chief holiday is Logfest, held on a weekend in July on various dates.

There are exactly twelve color gismu (see: http://members.tripod.co.uk/lojbanlinks/skari.html), & various attempts to match up the regular months of the year have been proposed. E.g.

in the beginners' stuff in this order:

blabi, grusi, xekri, xunre, crino, blanu, pelxu, cicna,
nukni, zirpu, bunre, narju

le'i mastycme

la labmast. la ri'ormast. la nukmast.
la rusymast. la blamast. la zirmast.
la xekmast. la pelmast. la burmast.
la xunmast. la cicnymast. la najymast.

The days of the week have been correlated to metals, & other sets of mnemonic or mythological names... E.g.

we can translate our existing weekdays back into
planets & then into the lojbanic names for their traditional
metal correspondences:

le'i jefcme

monday= la rijdei
tuesday= la tirdei
wednesday= la magdei
thursday= la tincydei
friday= la tukydei
saturday= la nisydei
sunday= la slodei

the traditional assignment of colors to planets gives:

monday white = la labdei
tuesday red = la xundei
wednesday gray = la rusydei
thursday blue = la bladei
friday green = la ri'ordei
saturday black = la xekydei
sunday yellow = la peldei

Another proposal uses the signs of the zodiac for months and the Japanese and Korean names for the days of the week. See Dates and Times in the Phrasebook.

What about using the Discordian Calendar? I can't be the only Discordian jbopre.

Or what about discarding calanders and referring to the approximate number of seconds passed since some epoch (UNIX epoch, or Global Positioning System Epoch, etc (1970 and 1980 respectively))? For referencing the time within the day you could discuss the absolute time modulo the number of seconds in a day.

Base 60 time is ugly enough; base 86400 is right out. You could, however, discuss the portion of the day that has elapsed (as a decimal), thus getting a sort of "metric time" such as .78342 (pize bici vore), which could be thought of as 7:83:42 in a time system with 100 seconds (.864 of an ordinary second) in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and 10 hours in a day.

Of course, let me establish right now that I don't honestly believe anyone would use that, but it's fun to make proposals like that. I may as well go one step farther and suggest hexadecimal time, with 16 hours in a day, 16 minutes in an hour, and 256 "seconds" in a minute, and times expressed like .3DB7 (pi cijau feize). That one's sure to satisfy those who want a new time system and those who want hexadecimal to be default, while actually being usable to no one. rab.spir la'e li ro ju'u dau ba na se pilno tinkit

Clearly, year 1 (the only calendar with a zero was that of the Khmer Rouge, not an example we wish to follow) should be the date of the start of the Loglan project, or possibly of the split between Loglan and Lojban. - mi'e kreig.daniyl.

Clearly more Lojbanic would be that everyone use the year they joined the community as year 1, after all we do have a place for the calendar. This way we have a perfectly unambiguous and perfectly confusing system.--mi'e xorxes

What about jbojbe? Year of birth? First word? Fluency?

Maybe the year of their first Logfest.

Then you can't undrestand those whose age in the community you don't know.

Be aware that the constructed-calendar scene is as complex and populous and varied (and as full of crackpots) as the constructed language scene. I'll try to get you some links of where you can look, but suffice to say that there are many weird, whacky, and wonderful (and less-than-wonderful) calendars that have been developed that could be used as a Lojban calendar (i.e., you can probably find Lojban-nature in them). --mi'e mark.

We shouldn't use Earth years and days or moon months to tell time in a logical languageespecially since the land where lojban is spoken most might be on a different planet ;-). How about something based directly on the atomic standard, measured in hertz/KHz/MHz/etc as needed? mi'e cein.

Hello people. Got two things to put to you today. One of them is the use of pi'e meaning "part of" to separate hours from minutes from seconds etc. That's fine. I can work with that, because seconds are parts of minutes are parts of hours. But when it comes to using this system to separate days from months, and months from years, I have a problem. Months are not parts of days and years are not parts of months. Surely if we're being correct, the format is (in logical order): year, month, day, hour, minute, second?

Another thing. Seen as this is for new calendar proposals, here's an idea that might suit:

- Years in the Common Era only are used (AD, not BC) - called "orbits" (BC < 0)
- Next, each day is numbered from 000 to 364 (365 in leap years)
- Then, we take the decimal time of each day eg 12:00 = 0.50000

For the time, three decimal places may be fine, but for more precision, five should really be used.

My current timestring is: 2005.097.02361 (Y2005 M04 D07 00:34Z)