Hey! My friend @zapiarty and I are trying to come up with a calendar system for Cardassia? The three moons make lunar months tricky, so we're having trouble, and we're also trying to work out week-equivalents and names. Do you have any ideas about this and about names for all this?
I have actually mulled this over a bit, but not lately. The question is unfortunately complicated further by the fact that, according to The Universal Translator, Cardassians work in Base 9, as opposed to the Base 10 we know. (Here’s a site that explains just what the heck that means.)
However, there are two things I can offer you!
1) My sister is a mathematician, so I can always ask her when she has a spare moment about the mathy bits I don’t have the patience for. :P
2) One source you might want to look into, names-wise, is the French Republican Calendar. To make a long story short, after the French Revolution, the new people running the show were intent on removing all references to religion and royalty from just about everything. And as part of that, they introduced a new calendar of 12 months with 30 days, with the new names having to do with nature and the seasonal weather. For example, what more or less corresponded to October was called “Brumaire” –basically the French word for mist, “brume,” with an ending sound tacked on.
This new calendar only just lasted past a decade before everyone went back to the one they were using before, but it’s very possible that when Cardassia was unified, not only was a standardised language introduced, but a standardised calendar as well. The French Revolutionary Calendar favoured natural and agricultural influences I suspect as a way of celebrating “the common people.” The Cardassian calendar might choose something else as its focus. Possibly famous historical patriots or generals or the like.
If you’d like my thoughts on old regional calendars, other ways of marking the year, or anything else, though, please send along your questions.
I didn’t know about that Base 9 thing, but I rather naturally decided that Cardassian weeks would count 9 days, easily divided into 3x3 days, and months would count 3 weeks (so 27 days). Then I didn’t settle on how many months the year would have, but I had in the idea that it might be x months + x days, and the extra days are holidays, such as the Tret Akleen festival time, which would mark the beginning of the new year.
At first I thought to name days after numbers (1rst day, 2nd day, 3rd day, etc) but I’m starting it might be interesting to name them after flowers or something instead. That’s something I thought of because of the cenabyra flower in our fanon, which is the symbolic flower of Akleen: an ugly little bush with striving thorns to protect the occasional pretty blue flowers.
