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The World Calendar retains the 12 months of the Gregorian calendar but alters the number of days in the months, so that each quarter contains a uniform number of 91 days. The first month in each quarter has 31 days, and the other two have 30. Note that 91 = 713, so each quarter contains exactly 13 weeks of 7 days. |
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This scheme is remarkably similar to the calendar used by the Essene sect, which produced, among other writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The calendar emphasized the seven-day week, with the consequence that the year consisted of 52 weeks, and therefore, 364 days. Each quarter contained 91 days in three months, arranged as 30, 30 and 31 days. The sect realized that their calendar was not synchronized with the year, but attributed the problem to "the sinfulness of man", a judgment applied with particular force to their immediate neighbors. |
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The WC is, in fact, supposed to be a perpetual calendar, with each day in the calendar always falling on the same day of the week (DOW). Each year is intended to start on Sunday January 1 and end on Saturday December 30. Nature has never cooperated with this scheme, however, since a common year contains 365 days. The total of four quarters is 4713 = 364 days. In the WC, the 365th day is an epagomenal day called Year Day, Day Y, or December Y, which is an odd sort of creature it is not actually counted as a day of any month, and is not even counted as a day of any week, but considered a second Saturday. The WC solved the perpetual problem of adjusting the week to the year by the expedient of throwing the offending extra day as far outside the system as it will go. |
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In leap years, the same scheme is used to insert an intercalary day between June and July. This day, called Day L or June L is also a second Saturday, and is not supposed to be part of any month or be a day of any week. |
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The nomenclature of these days changed over time. Both Day Y and Day L were later denoted as "Worldsdays" in WCA literature. |
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Because the WC existed only in the form of a proposal, certain features were apparently left negotiable. The rule for leap year is often referred to as "quadrennial", which would be, strictly speaking, the Julian rule. The WC literature does not seem to address this issue. Conversations with the current Director of the IWCA, Norman C. Lindhjem, indicate that this feature of the WC was not defined but was assumed to be the current, or Gregorian, rule. Assume here that the WC, if adopted, would have used the more accurate Gregorian leap year rule. |
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There are a number of consequences of this calendar. The system of days of the week, which is a continuous and useful regular cycle, would be interrupted and restarted at the beginning of every year, so that its utility would be confined to a single year. The scheme of treating the intercalary and epagomenal days as numerically unrelated to the rest of the calendar is not really workable from a computational perspective, since their positions must be assigned by some method which is essentially numerical. Even with the manual algorithmic methods available in the period of its proposal, Day L would be most efficiently calculated as June 31, to place it correctly |
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