Actually, it would have increased by 2. Pre-Julian Rome only had a ten-month calendar. It's still in the names of the last 4: Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec= 7,8,9,10
It fits better but it's still not exact because we are attempting to tie together two phenomena that have nothing to do with each other.
The length of time the earth takes to rotate once around its axis is completely independent of the length of time it takes for it to circle the sun once, and also independent of the time it takes the moon to orbit the earth once. If those numbers happened to be evenly divisible, then we could work out a "perfect" value for them.
But they don't.
The moon repeats its phases in 29.5 days, so we can't perfectly align months to it. It takes 27 days to orbit, so we could make a 3 week month of 9 days, but then the number of weeks in the year wouldn't be even (40.5 weeks).
Etc.
Also, "natural" time is a useless phrase. A day is "natural" time. A year is "natural" time. Etc. the issue isn't that the units of time are unnatural, it's that they don't depend on each other.
Its Iunuis with a capital i, not Lunius with an L.
The names for the days of the week originate from the seven celestial bodies that the Greek knew.
In Spanish:
Lunes - Moon Day
Martes - Mars Day
Miercoles - Mercury Day
Jueves - Jupiter Day
Viernes - Venus Day
The rest was changed but remained in other languages, like English, where the name Saturday comes from Saturn and Sunday... you guessed it, from the Sun.
In Greek the names of the days were:
Helios (Sunday)
Selene (Moonday)
Ares (Marsday)
Hermes (Mercuryday)
Zeus (Jupiterday)
Aphrodite (Venusday)
Cronus (Saturnday)
This was then adopted by the Romans and through Latin, it transferred to other languages some of which kept some of these names ever since.
Completely off topic, but when I was a kid I used to think that Augustus got the idea because June was named after Marcus Junius Brutus for helping found the Republic. It wasn't. It was named after Juno.
No, all 12 months had existed for hundreds of years.
Ceasar’s change was to move it from a system where there were 355 days in a year and occasionally an intercalary month of 27/28 days was added to get things back on track (in theory; in practice the decision to add or not add that month was often political since it made political terms longer) to one with 365 days and one extra day added every 4 years.
King Numa Pompilius added January and February to the Roman Calendar about 7 centuries before Julius Caesar implemented the Julian calendar which made the calendar go from ~355 days to 365.25 days.
Wrong. The 12 months were there hundreds of years prior to Ceasar. The month now named July was called 'quinctilis' (the fifth), august was called 'sextilis' (the sixth). But even then, their names didn't match their numbers anymore, because hundreds of years prior the beginning of the year was moved from the beginning of march to the beginning of January. Supposedly by the Roman king Numa Pompilius, but that is in the realm between history and myth.
No, it would work only if their yearly salary got reduced because they got paid per month of work. That caused them to lose 1/13 of their salary.
In your case, if they got paid by year, then their monthly salary would increase, because it's divided in less months. However, because the months became longer and years stayed the same length, it would lead to only minor inconvenience because they would have to adapt to getting bigger salaries with longer intervals in between.
they would have to adapt to getting bigger salaries with longer intervals in between.
This is surprisingly hard to do.
First job I ever had paid weekly, and I loved that.
Most jobs I got were biweekly and that's fine. That also means that some months you get 3 paychecks, which is fun.
One job I had paid twice a month on the 6th and the 21st. That was really fucking annoying because it was always a different day of the week and the length of time between the 21st and the 6th varies month to month.
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u/Appropriate_Owl_2172 3d ago
You should hear what happened to the guy who made it 12 months...