Felaryan Calendar

Owlcats... XD

 
Nyaha: well for the name of the months, it's really not the fact they are modified to make them in alphabetic order that bother me ( it would be the same if it was names I created but reordered that way ). It just strikes me as odd and a bit.. artificial ?
I think being user-friendly is nice but it's already the case with 12 months.  I feel this is a bit too much...  

Bael : The Yne suffix sounds good I think ^^   However I'm not sure about putting it for all months. It's like for the months in english ( or in french in that matter ) :  you get a couple recurring suffixes for a couple months ( January,  February ) but it's not uniform.
and you could have a couple more meanings like ( on top of my head ) :
The time of Araxiad -  Blessing of Fealanthia - Song of Shiwo  etc. it's also a bit more poetic which fits the elves well ^^

So for the calendar itself :  should we go with like 12 different plants as a mean of measurement ( with each their particularities ) or less of them but with very visible stages of their growth ?

A farm has 12 plots of one plant (or multiple plants that take roughly the same amount of time to mature to harvest), arranged in a circle. each month, one of the 12 plots is harvested and replanted.

This month:


Next month:


continue cycling through each month until you loop back around to he same setup as month 1. That's a year.

@Karbo:

Yeah, I'm not sure what kinds of other suffixes to use though. I agree though it is poetic...once again though I always feel like single months are too short for a plant to grow, or even for the fruit to flower and grow as well. I have a bunch of trees in my backyard, they all take a long time to grow, much much longer than a month, so 'rotating' them wont matter. That's why I'm more in favor of the second option. I have visible examples of how long it takes fruit to grow in my back yard.

Back to the suffixes though, I always just browse through in my head a bunch of different sounds.

-dahl
-atar
-inwe
-annur/annor (for "Fealanthia" I imagine would look more like: Fealanth'a'nnor, or commonly shortened to "Fealannor" in common usage, because the formal one would be long)

Okay, at this point, I'm convinced that you people are misinterpreting what Xion is saying on purpose.  They do NOT grow in a month.  Let me repeat just to make absolutely sure you did not misread it.  They do NOT grow in a month!

There are twelve plots of land.  It takes roughly a year or so for a singular plot to be fully ready to be harvested.  Got it?  A full year.  But they don't plant every single plot at once.  Instead, one of the twelve plots is planted.  A month passes, and it's not ready to be harvested yet.  Got it?  It's not ready for harvest in a single month.  Since it's not ready, the second plot is planted.  Fast forward until all twelve plots are planted.  Now, by the time the twelfth plot is planted, and a month passes, the first plot has is now ready to be harvested.  In case you lost count, which wouldn't surprise me given all the comments till now, a full year has passed before that first plot was first planted.  So the elves harvest it and then replant it.  But then, another month passes, and now the second plot is ready for harvest because it has now been a year since that one was first planted.  So they harvest that one, then another month passes, and now the third plot is ready for harvest because it has since been year since they planted that one, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Do you finally get it now?  Does Xion need to draw you guys a second diagram for you to finally understand how it's actually supposed to work?

If they don't understand it in words, then yes make visual using photoshop. It's why pictures are needed sometimes for explaining things such as this, diagrams and the such.

I actually did make a diagram, that's what the Imgur links above are. My forum-fu simply isn't strong enough to embed them properly in the post.

XionGaTaosenai wrote:

I actually did make a diagram, that's what the Imgur links above are. My forum-fu simply isn't strong enough to embed them properly in the post.

XD Forum-Fu. Never seen that one. But embeding isn't necessary is it? Doesn't Imgur use linking or have some kind of simple thumb nail code?

So what exactly is growing in 12 month/1 month cycles? This whole time I was thinking trees as the crops, since in Felarya its hard to find large arable/farmable land, at least without cutting down trees that are incomprehensibly massive.

XionGaTaosenai wrote:

I actually did make a diagram, that's what the Imgur links above are. My forum-fu simply isn't strong enough to embed them properly in the post.

Wait...so there's people on this thread who can't see them? I can see the diagrams clearly.

My only issue with that setup is that it only really makes sense if the crops have a total cycle approximately equal to the number of plots multiplied by the length of a "month" in the system. If you keep your "month" constant, then you'll need different numbers of plots per circle for each crop; if you keep the number of plots constant, you'll need different month lengths for each crop (in theory, if the crops have full cycle times that are integer multiples of each other or close to it, this isn't a problem, but I don't see that as particularly likely). The system also precludes effective crop rotation, which is an important part of keeping fields fertile, unless all the crops have the same cycle, and as I've said before, Felaryan crops can have whatever cycle they want because there's no overarching cycle for them to adhere to.

Ilceren wrote:

Then again, you look at our own calendar and you can ask yourself the same thing. Why twelve? We know a division of four could have been done based on the seasons, but the extra step to make it twelve isn't all that clear. So yeah, arbitrarity is a valid reason.

The twelve-month year is actually based roughly off the lunar cycle, with each cycle corresponding to a month; for obvious reasons, Felarya doesn't have this.

As for the number of plots in a circle, I think the best way to do it would be to divide the full length of a cycle by the length of time that a crop is effectively harvestable, thus giving you one harvestable plot at all times; this removes the need for much in the way of long-term food storage of perishable crops.

It's divided into 12 parts because 12 is an awesome number. I mean, it's divisible by 3 and 4, which makes it super useful for splitting into smaller subsections. I mean, why are our clocks divided into 12 hours? There's no broad reason for it, it's just super handy.

(Fun fact: I am a dozenalist, or a person who believes that society would run much better if we counted in base 12 instead of base 10.)

For crop rotation, I actually had the idea that the crop that's grown this way is planted alongside large trees which are not harvested but periodically pruned, and the fallen leaves from the trees fertilize the soil, alleviating the need for rotation. I also had the idea that the tree in question produces irritants similar to poison ivy, a trait uniquely useful to a Felaryan farm as the rash-inducing canopy discourages predator hands!

for the number 12,the reason is really mostly to be user-friendly I think.

Indeed if you have a year made of either more or less months on a basis of a 30 days months, then you are looking at a significantly different meaning of a "year" in Felarya. And so it makes the chronology more difficult to apprehend.

Xion : it's a great diagram idea having a wheel works especially well in this case. I'd like to use it for illustrating the calendar :3

Karbo wrote:

for the number 12,the reason is really mostly to be user-friendly I think.

Indeed if you have a year made of either more or less months on a basis of a 30 days months, then you are looking at a significantly different meaning of a "year" in Felarya. And so it makes the chronology more difficult to apprehend.

Xion : it's a great diagram idea having a wheel works especially well in this case. I'd like to use it for illustrating the calendar :3

Huh never thought about that before but if we mess with the way a year is perceived and calculated would TOTALLY have the community in a uproar and lead to ALLOT re-calculating and headches. As much fun as it'd be to play with the calendar year beyond a simple user friedly 12 months? Probably should leave it be. Especially since you got a cool idea for how to draw a wheel based system using "Karbo" stye. It sounds oddly practical and kinda visually appealing when you add in what kinda theme. I say go with it. It sound practical and visually appealing.

" Multiple calendars and means to measure the passing of time exist in Felarya. The most significant one is the one created by the elven empire. It stood the test of time remarkably well and managed to remain relatively unchanged. Even the names of the months, derived from elven deities, stayed almost the same, although some variations exist.

With an ever-changing sky and no significant seasons to use as a mark, elves found out the most satisfying way to measure the count of passing days in Felarya was to use the growth cycle of certain plants. They realized that the X,X, X, X grow with an astonishing regularity, from a planted seed to a full bloom, no mater what their environment is. Thus they organized their calendar as such :  ( drawing of the wheel )

The elven calendar uses twelves months in a year with each month being 30 days or 3  ( insert name for 10 days period )

The months are named from short elven phrases,each about a certain deity from the elven pantheon ( examples )  Nowadays the names have become so common among the population that most people seldom realize the true origins of the names.


It's a basic version using what some of you wrote in the thread but what do you think about it ? ( don't hesitate if you have one of your own )

@ Karbo: That seems like a nice fit. Although, I think that the Magiocrats may edit it so that each month would be a single word instead of a phrase. For example:

Elf 1: "Hey, what month is it?"
Elf 2: "Its Kalata baro Nikto."
Elf 1: "What?"
Fairy 1: "Nah, just Kalata"
Elf 1: "Ok, thanks"
Followed by the devouring of Elf 1 and 2 by the fairy! :3

But yeah, that wheel thing would fit in perfectly, I imagine it would look similar to the Mayan calendar?

I did write a mock entry for the calendar which can be found on page 3, for anyone still interested. Feel free to change it up a bit.

So... are weeks in Felarya 10 days long, or was it something the ancient elven empire did that went out of style by present time?

I figured we could go with section of 10 days instead of 7 so 3 of those section = a month.

While writing the entry though I realized having that plot of plants growing would be actually really hard to handle.. basically if you have a time-measuring farm in a place ( say Negav, ) having another one in Nekomura for example would be tricky. You would have to be synchronized to plant the seeds at a certain time and well in advance. And if the farm of a settlement get destroyed for a reason or another it's even more problematic.

So what if we have instead a plant, let's call it the Sarafras, that grow with remarkable regularity all across Felarya. Once the plant goes past a certain stage of its cycle it will accelerate or slow its growth, in order to match that of all Sarafras across Felarya.
What do you think ?

I think Xion's idea is that only the ancient elves used the farming plot to calculate time. Fast forward to present times, and while that particular method of farming fell out of style for the reasons you enumerated, people continued to use the elves' idea that there are twelve months to a year, three weeks to a month, ten days to a week, and so on when they made their own calendars.

Shady Knight wrote:

I think Xion's idea is that only the ancient elves used the farming plot to calculate time.  Fast forward to present times, and while that particular method of farming fell out of style for the reasons you enumerated, people continued to use the elves' idea that there are twelve months to a year, three weeks to a month, ten days to a week, and so on when they made their own calendars.

So basically once it was established they could just count on their own and not be completely reliant on the planting method?

Karbo wrote:

So what if we have instead a plant, let's call it the Sarafras, that grow with remarkable regularity all across Felarya. Once the plant goes past a certain stage of its cycle it will accelerate or slow its growth, in order to match that of all Sarafras across Felarya.
What do you think ?

That would actually completely break the whole idea of different plots of plants being used as the basis for a "month". If all of the plants are at the same stage of life, why not harvest them all at once? Unless the time it takes before a plant "synchs up" with the rest is equal to a "year", but then we're right back where we started.

But I see the problem, in that if two communities have their "planting day" a few days off, that means that the transition between months would be off by a few days as well. So every community that used the system, all over Felarya, would have to plant and harvest on the same day in order for the calendars to line up. However, an empire is a force powerful enough to organize such a thing. Each farm planted on the same day because the Elven government told them which days to plant on, and then once the Elven Empire fell apart, the precedent was there and everyone had simply memorized it. The farm being used as a clock is not strictly necessary anymore, and modern farms may or may not be lined up with the official calendar, but the farms are still used, since the crops are still generally useful plants to have around. (As I've said earlier, it's probably Felarya's staple grain, equivalent to Wheat/Rice/Corn in our world. Civilizations are ultimately built on grain, and I see no reason why Felaryan civilizations should be any different. The grain is the most important crop, so it would make sense for a calendar to use that over other plants.)

Rather than scrap the idea of Sarafras entirely, how about we instead re-purpose it as the elven empire's main grain? Instead of accelerating or slowing down its growth to match those of other plants, which as Xion brought up, completely breaks the whole idea of farming plots as clocks, they instead have a remarkably stable growth rate, where plants more or less always take the same amount of time to reach full maturity, in this case about a year, with deviations in that growth cycles between plants being at most a couple of days apart, something negligible like that? It would explain why the elves' calendar was so accurate at the time.