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Thoughts on Years
Jul. 2nd, 2022 05:33 pmWas rereading my favorite part from The Valley of Horses. When I got to the part where Jondalar figures out how long Ayla's been in the valley, I wandered off to Wikipedia. In the book, Jondalar makes tally marks of each "moon time" mark Ayla has made on her sticks. He makes thirteen marks for her first year, and twelve marks for her second year. The book doesn't say how many marks he made for her third year.
Wikipedia didn't help there. It only says that originally lunarsolar calendars were calculated by observation instead of using a formula. And also that there are seven long years in a nineteen year period. Incredibly crude mathing on my fingers confirm that there's no way to cleanly make a repeating pattern of long and short years that perfectly fit a nineteen year period. The "cleanest" pattern I could come up with was LSS,LSS,LSS,LS,LSS,LSS,LS. Anyway, the point of all that was simply to figure out of Jondalar had made twelve or thirteen tally marks for Ayla's third year. From my "cleanest pattern", chances are pretty good Jondalar made twelve tally marks.
And then I started thinking about what exactly a year is. I don't mean literal definition, of which that's a complicated subject which has multiple articles. I mean what a year is according to the average layperson. Every non-scientific, non-anal person will tell you that a year is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun. The sidereal year.
That really can't be right. The history of calendars is a fight to keep the seasons in place, regardless of where in its orbit the Earth actually is. If it really was about Earth's position in its orbit, humans would have allowed January to drift into summer by now.
I think what is actually being referred to by the word "year" is the tropical year, the cycling through the seasons. There's been several reforms just to keep January cold. No reform cares about keeping the Sun in Capricorn in January.
Wikipedia didn't help there. It only says that originally lunarsolar calendars were calculated by observation instead of using a formula. And also that there are seven long years in a nineteen year period. Incredibly crude mathing on my fingers confirm that there's no way to cleanly make a repeating pattern of long and short years that perfectly fit a nineteen year period. The "cleanest" pattern I could come up with was LSS,LSS,LSS,LS,LSS,LSS,LS. Anyway, the point of all that was simply to figure out of Jondalar had made twelve or thirteen tally marks for Ayla's third year. From my "cleanest pattern", chances are pretty good Jondalar made twelve tally marks.
And then I started thinking about what exactly a year is. I don't mean literal definition, of which that's a complicated subject which has multiple articles. I mean what a year is according to the average layperson. Every non-scientific, non-anal person will tell you that a year is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the Sun. The sidereal year.
That really can't be right. The history of calendars is a fight to keep the seasons in place, regardless of where in its orbit the Earth actually is. If it really was about Earth's position in its orbit, humans would have allowed January to drift into summer by now.
I think what is actually being referred to by the word "year" is the tropical year, the cycling through the seasons. There's been several reforms just to keep January cold. No reform cares about keeping the Sun in Capricorn in January.
