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The world has many seasons each year, but there is only one pivot for the Thellid Calendar!

The Pivot Of The Year

The crux of the year for the Thellid Calendar is the winter solstice of the northern hemisphere¹. This is called "Old Year's Day" and is ALWAYS the last day of the year. It is a special day and falls outside the normal days of the week and outside the normal months. It has NO day of the week!

All other days of the year are assigned a day of the week, (except the Leap Day).

The day following Old Year's Day is called "New Year's Day" and it is always the first day of the week² and of the year.

NOTE: A given solstice occurs at a different time for each longitude and it will often occur that two places have that solstice on a different DAY! For this reason the Thellid Calendar is tied to the solstice at one place only, otherwise half the world would have a calendar that differs by one day from the other half. It is convenient to use the Greenwich Observatory in London as that place, since it has been the time standard for centuries.

The Leap Day

In Leap Years, (years when the Greenwich Winter Solstice, (GWS), would have otherwise have moved on to New Year's Day), an additional day is added immediately before Old Year's Day. It is called "Leap Day" and it too falls outside the normal week.

I am well aware that inserting a leap day BEFORE Old Year's Day creates problems that would be obviated by inserting it AFTER Old Year's Day. These problems relate to the fact that you can't tell if the 365th day of the year is a Leap Day just by looking at it, 3 out of 4 times it will be an Old Year's Day. If the Leap Day came AFTER Old Year's Day then the 366th day would ALWAYS be a Leap Day and the 365th day would ALWAYS be Old Year's Day. This is wonderful mathematically, but semantically and socially it is unacceptable!

The New Year must immediately follow the old: you can't have an extra day between the two! What would that mean? A day with no year? And socially, the night between the two days is CRITICAL! We all get together to ring out the old and see in the new. To insert a day between the two would throw the whole celebration out of whack. For these reasons I consider a little mathematical inconvenience to be an acceptable price to pay for a system that makes sense socially.

NOTE: Thellid Leap Years DO NOT generally coincide with Gregorian Leap Years! Nor do they always occur 4 years apart. It all depends on how the natural procession of the seasons at Greenwich coincides with the rotation of the Earth. Because the Thellid Calendar is DRIVEN by the GWS instead of trying to predict it, it is self correcting, however, this also means that you need an ephemeris or almanac to establish whether a year will be a Leap Year, you cannot tell just be looking at it. I regret the inconvenience but I believe the benefits more than outweigh the price. You can find a list of modern Thellid Leap Years here.

Naming Conventions

The names of the months and the days of the week in the Gregorian system are interesting but they are inconsistent, sometimes unimaginative and generally culturally loaded. The northern European nations use the names of the Norse gods for their weekdays and the southern Europeans use the Roman gods. The days of the month are a mishmash of gods: (Janus, Mars (also used for 2nd day of the week), Maius), emperors: (Julius, Augustus), numbers (sept, oct etc) and ordinary words: (februum, aperire).

Since the Thellid months do not correspond to the Gregorian months I had to rename the months to avoid confusion and I had to invent new names for the extra 3 months. In light of the fact that the week days are culturally loaded and considering the fact that the weeks needed to be named I decided to just go ahead and invent new names for everything.

Once I had decided to do this I decided to institute some rules in how these things should be named:

• Each name should start with a unique phoneme.
  Typically we abbreviate month names eg. "March" becomes "Mar". We can't use "M" or "Ma" because those would also apply to "May". By mandating that each month, week and day name starts with a different phoneme we can allow unambiguous one phoneme abbreviations of all of these. So the 3rd day of the 2nd week of the 6th month (Gunji, Yervein, Kalvazzi) may simply be abbreviated to "GYK". This is simple, accurate and efficient.
  
  Unfortunately however the English script has a number of problems that upset this concept a little: There are letters that are redundant "C" (is pronounced as either "K" or "S") or uncertain "Q", "X". With these 3 removed we have only 23 symbols for the first letter of the required 26 names.
  
  Fortunately the English languages uses more phonemes than the 26 graphemes it uses to write itself and there are also phonemes that are common in other languages which may also be used. With this in mind I chose the phonemes "th" and "sh" from standard English and "ng" from numerous other languages including many African and Australian languages³.
  
  These phonemes do not have single symbol representations in English but they DO in other scripts, including the Martian scripts which you can find elsewhere. If you use those scripts the Thellid naming will abbreviate beautifully. In the case of the conventional English script it will still abbreviate well, just use Th, Sh and Ng and you'll be fine.
• Names should not be culturally loaded.
  The Thellid Calendar is intended to be used universally across the world. The names should be neutral so that they can absorb the meaning the users will project onto them. The names should also sound reasonably natural in each country so that there is no need to invent new names. Of course this is impossible with tonal languages such as Chinese but hopefully after they have assigned suitable tones to the words they will still be recognisable...
  
  I have deliberately given culturally varied character to each of the names so that various cultures will feel that they own a piece of the calendar. Conversely each culture can feel all the other cultures represented and see that they are only a part of the whole.
• All month names should have 3 syllables.
  Months are important and giving them 3 syllables helps to convey that. Keeping them all a consistent length is also useful for rhetorical devices such as rhythm which open up opportunities in poetry and prose that would otherwise be missing.
• All week and day names should have 2 syllables.
  Day names are used more commonly than month names and therefore need to be shorter. This is the case for most English days: Monday, Tuesday etc so I stuck with it.
  
  The weeks don't have names in English and I don't know how much they will be used but I gave them 2 syllable names in case they turn out to be popular...

The Months

There are 13 ordinary months of 28 days each year. There are also 2 vestigial months of one day that may be added to a year depending on whether it is a leap year or not. In order the names are:

1. Alvakku
2. Bethanis
3. Duvadda
4. Emovvi
5. Forkithal
6. Kalvazzi
7. Irentos
8. Jukennuk
9. Miskullen
10. Ossakov
11. Raikkaved
12. Underro
13. Zithebbe
14. Nabbakan
15. Werrimul

Since there are 13 months, they do not fit neatly into 4 seasons. This is perhaps not such a problem as some might at first think, for the following reasons:

• In many parts of the world there are not 4 seasons, and the seasons that there are do not correspond to the timing of those in the temperate regions.
• Even if you do live in a temperate four-season regime, seasons don't arrive on schedule anyway. It is not uncommon for a season to be a month late, in which case ascribing that month to that season is pointless.
• We are less intimately connected with the changing climate than we were a thousand years ago, so that it is no longer terribly relevant what the weather is doing outside.

It is sad to lose the divisibility of 12 months but more important to us now is the unit of the week, and that is preserved and enhanced!

The Weeks

There are 4 weeks of 7 days in each of the first 13 months. In the Gregorian system the weeks don't synchronize with the months at all and therefore they are ignored when it comes to assigning dates but in the Thellid system they DO line up and they CAN be used to meaningfully specify dates. For example it might be meaningful to specify that an event should happen on the second day of the second week of the 4th month (Harvest Day). It could be specified as 2/2/4 or we can use the name of the week. The weeks don't have names in the Gregorian system but in the Thellid system they do! Harvest Day is always: Lokkan, Yervein, Emovvi, (LYE).

The 4 normal weeks have names. Since the final 2 months contain only one day it is meaningless to assign a week to them and they consequently have no week name⁴. In order the week names are:

1. Nganda
2. Yervein
3. Shommak
4. Thimmel

The Days Of The Week

There are 7 days in the week. For the same reasons I cited in changing the names of the months I have changed the names of the days of the week. It is sad for many of us to lose our linguistic connection with the pre-Christian Gods but it is time to move on. In order their names are:

1. Pasku
2. Lokkan
3. Gunji
4. Hithed
5. Shevro
6. Teijal
7. Vaira

In the current Western culture Teijal and Vaira form the weekend; a period where most do not have to work.

The idea of 5 days work and 2 days off is a reasonable model and should never be allowed to be pushed back to a greater work/relax ratio. Indeed a more civilised ratio would be 4:3.

Counting The Years

Rather than assigning the year zero to some dubious point in time, arrived at by some religious organisation, based on interpreting some archaic piece of writing, of doubtful provenance, of significance only to a minority of the global population, it would be far better to assign it to something we can ALL share in, such as: the beginning of human civilisation! Apart from providing a start for counting the years it provides a humbling and salutary reminder of just how short our history really is!

Of course we don't know exactly what year human civilisation began, but archaeological evidence of the first permanent human-built settlements and agriculture are all within the last 12,000 years. For this reason the Thellid Calendar adopts the Human Era (HE) starting point, as proposed by Cesare Emiliani in 1993.

To convert our current system of "Common Era" dates to Human Era we need only add 10,000, (often simply prefixing a 1), to all positive CE years, (all AD years), and subtract all negative CE years, (all BC years), from 10,001⁵. So:

• the birth of Charlemagne in ~742 AD becomes ~10,742 HE.
• the fall of Constantinople in 1,453 CE becomes 11,453 HE.
• the death of Emperor Ai of Han in 1 BC, (also the year 0 CE), becomes 10,000 HE.
• the birth of Herodotus in ~484 BC becomes ~9517 HE.
• the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt, c. 3,100 BC, becomes c. 6,901 HE.

Note that strictly speaking Emiliani's HE format only works with Gregorian years. The Thellid year normally begins 9 or 10 days before the Gregorian one, meaning that Gregorian HE dates between 21 and 31 December, will have a Thellid HE date ONE YEAR LATER. For this reason, where there is any doubt, all Thellid dates should be followed by the designation "T". Eg 8,075 T, 12,012 T.

Date Notation

Date notation is simple enough for the most part: eg 13th of Duvadda, 12,005 becomes 13/3/12005 T or 3/13/12005 T (depending on what country you are from⁶) or simply 69/12005 T (getting rid of the month classification).

The designation "T" should be applied when there is any doubt as to whether it is a Thellid or Gregorian Date. In a page that is clearly exclusively full of Thellid dates it is not necessary.

A difficulty occurs with Leap Day and Old Year's Day. If you get rid of the month there is no problem, eg 365/12005 T or 366/12004 T, although you can't tell just from the number 365 whether it was a Leap Day or not. (You may need to consult your almanac for this.) This problem is best fixed by naming the day, eg Leap Day 12004 T, Old Year's Day 12005 T.

This problem is worst however, when you use a notation that requires a month for a day that has no month! The solution is to create 2 extra months, each of one day, simply for the benefit of numeric notation. Leap Day is the first day of Nabbakan, (the 14th month), and Old Year's Day is the first day of Werrimul, (the 15th month). So Leap Day 12,062 T may be written as 1st Nabbakan, 12062, or 1/14/12062 T. Old Year's Day 12,031 T becomes 1st Werrimul, 12031 or 1/15/12031 T. Old Year's Day will be recorded as the 15th month whether or not there was a 14th month that year⁷.

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1. The Winter Solstice at Greenwich, England to be precise.
2. The first day after the weekend, ie the day that used to be called Monday.
3. It occurs in English, just not at the start of words.
4. For the purposes of the Thellid Horoscope however they are assigned week 3 (Shommak), but that is only for the horoscope.
5. Because there is NO year zero in the AD/BC counting scheme we make 1 BC the year 0 and thus all BC dates lose a year before being subtracted from 10,0000.
6. But day/month/year notation is preferred as it makes more sense mathematically. The scheme of month/day/year is just based on a way of speaking; letting this drive written notation is the tail wagging the dog.
7. I could have recommended one just extra month with 2 days 1 year out of 4, but this way you CAN tell, just by looking, if the date was a Leap Day.