I do believe we need a timeline of the Mythic Archipelago

My people recognize seasons but they have no official calendar. Compared to your islands, my people are Neandrethals.

 

Although my settler cities will of course be in on the international calendar.

 

As long as you keep the coin flowing in our coffers we don't care what calendar the hooligans use. We of the Byrá trading guild use the universal trade calendar. The hooligans will too if they want to get their hands on Sifx. Byrá was un unhabited up until about 40 years ago. Also a thought to consider is that eruptions are typically acompanied by earthquakes and sometimes tsumanis. Just a thought. If an earthquake happened during an eruption my island could be pushed up from below the surface of the waves. This would also helpp to explain the hot springs that supply the water and sifx that covers my island. Byrá could only be 311 years old. Which would explain why no one has populated it until recently. What do you all think?

 

How does everyone feel about using the french republic calender as a template? I will go through the information and present a less confusing summary of it than the Wikipedia article and make some alterations to make it "ours." The main reason I thought of it is that we can get a calender different than the Gregorian one by using one that already exists but nobody uses.

 

I had a really nicely formatted word document but it "exceeds the attachment size" for this forum. So this will probably not look very nice but it details the calendar I'm proposing.

Archipelago Universal Calendar (AUC)
As compiled by myrddin173 based on the French Republican Calendar (FRC)

Months
The year is made up of 12 months of 30 days each plus a variable number of “feast days.”

In the FRC these are named:
FRC Month English Translation
Vendemaire Grape harvest
Brumaire Fog
Frimaire Frost
Nivose Snowy
Pluviose Rainy
Ventose Windy
Germinal Germination
Floreal Flower
Prairial Pasture
Messidor Harvest
Thermidor Summer heat
Fructidor Fruit

The Thirtieth of Fructidor is followed by five (six on leap years) feast days. The first of Vendemaire (and therefore the first of the year) falls on the Autumnal Equinox.

I would propose moving the first of the year to the Winter Solstice. That way the days start out growing than shortening as opposed to shortening, growing then shortening.


Weeks
In the FRC the months are broken into three ten-day weeks (decades in the original). These are named Primidi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quntidi, Sextidi, Septidi, Octidi, Nonidi, and Decadi which translate to first day, second day, et cetera. So there would be 36.5 weeks in a year.


Leap Year
The FRC was in effect for a relatively short amount of time and never really solved the problem of leap years because the year was based on the equinox. I’m going to propose that we either ignore leap years (and say the Mythic Archipelago planet is slightly closer to its sun than the Earth and the year is exactly 365 days) or use the following system.

Years 3, 7, 11, 15, 20 are leap years. After this point a year is a leap year if it is divisible by four unless it is also divisible by 128.



If this is ratified by the other editors in chief (we really should have a unanimous vote) then we should come up with new names for the months, days of the week, and feast days but that could wait. In the interim we could simply say month one day one

 

I third telcontar. Not all the civilizations of the archipelago are the most advanced in the world so it would stand to reason they would keep things simple.

 

I don't like the idea of Leap Years. Like everyone else said, it's something we won't be wanting to worry about in the long run.

 

I think it might be sufficient to have some of the nations, or even just one, use calender X. As long as we all agree that the date is now 311 on said calendar, we have a fixed point on which to set our timelines, even though they might use a different calendar which perhaps even started before year 1 in the 1-311 calendar. Of course, creating some events that affected the global community or parts of it would be nice so everyone can set their history in the bigger framework and create a consistent picture of the world. But I do think it doesn't matter how each nation is counting it's years.


EDIT: Somehow missed that there were more than one page to this... Well, with the Republican Calendar, I'm not so sure... I think it might be easier to use our calendar and simplyfy it to 12 months à 30 days with 6 day weeks, or with 35 days and 7 day weeks, and also use a 24h time. The concept of the decimal calendar might be a little too alien, especially with the decimal time - if you write that your story takes place in decimal time, I think the reader will either think the days are pretty short, or have a hard time translating decimal time into our time so he can actually figure out and imagine what time it is and how the setting would be at that time. The whole concept of time is a very tricky thing and I suppose meddling too much with it is a little challenging (I personally can't really see myself getting the feel for a decimal hour or something, either.)

 

It's remarkable how similar your calendar is to my hooligan calendar, lol. Especially since I didn't reference the french republican calendar to create mine... Weird.

I don't think that there is any cause to meddle with the length of days/hours, etc. People are pretty conditioned to their lengths, as modern society essentially lives by the clock. If we start insisting that an hour is 87 minutes long, and there are thirty of them in a day/night cycle, it's going to mess with people. Probably primarily us once we actually start writing, but the eventually any readers as well. I think timekeeping should probably just be left as earth normal, whatever you decide to name your months/days.

 

I had thought about including decimal time, but it didn't take very long to decide it was just to confusing so I didn't include it in by proposal. I didn't touch on anything shorter than a day so we would still use the 24hr day.

 

Ah, ok, I must have missed that part

 

If we do 360 in a year will we be doing 5 days of sort of an end year celebration?

 

That works for me. My natives won't be doing much with the Archipelago calendar, but I know the settlers on the island will be as they're from other parts of the islands.