5 September 2008
Julian Day:
2 454 715.59994
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“ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US...” |
“One of the greatest Latin books I have read” |
“Today it is impossible to think of a life unregulated by clocks or a day structured other than in 24 60-minute hours. In the Middle Ages it was different, however, and changing.” |
“A ‘must’ for any non-native business English learner” |
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Truncated
Julian Day:
14 715.09994
UNIX Time:
1 220 667 835
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Special thanks to Can Dai Quang for Cham and Qinglian Zhao for Naxi, both from the University of Hawaii
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Minority Language Planetary Gazetteer
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“Les Très Riches Heures” |
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September |
Here’s today’s date in over 150 languages. I’m
favoring those that are at least a bit off the beaten track, and/or have names for the
months that depart substantially from your run-of-the-mill neo-Roman. Accordingly you
won’t find French, Mandarin Chinese, or Greek, say, but rather Walloon, Dzongkha, and
Pontic. Sliding your mouse over each language’s name will
reveal its pedigree. Brown terms in parentheses are alternate names for the languages, while those
in brackets specify the subdivision or dialect shown.
For those languages that expired before the advent of modern place-value numerals
I’m using Roman. For Etruscan I’m using Etruscan numerals (basically Roman
except that they used a lambda for 5) while pretending that those serene, elbow-lounging
folks used the Gregorian calendar and reckoned dates sequentially as we do. Traditional
Chuvash numerals follow a similar scheme, but with the smaller units to the left of
the larger ones, a slash for 5, and a star for 1000. Mokshan resembles Chavash but
uses that lambda for 10 and a kind of reflected sawhorse for 1000.
The only non-Gregorian date I’m showing is an estimate for the
Gaulish, whose calendar was offset by about half a month from that used by their
Roman contemporaries and whose months alternated between 29 and 30 days as opposed to 30 and 31.
For the sake of uniformity the program writes everything out in the continental
fashion of date, month name, and year. (Classical Latin, a very special case, is here.) It’s likely some languages
might require inflectional modifications on the month names or other refinements, so
just let me know and
I’ll incorporate them.
Peter
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