[TUHS] When did "man cal" lose the comment about 1752?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Tuesday, July 16th, 2024 at 1:22 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen at sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> markus schnalke wrote in
> 1sTc9e-0hh-00 at marmaro.de:
> 
> |[2024-07-15 15:52] Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu
> 
> |>
> 
> |>> Yeah, but if you do that you have to treat the places
> 
> |>> acquired in the Louisiana Purchase differently because
> 
> |>> they switched in 1582. And Puerto Rico. Bleh.
> 
> |>
> 
> |> Then there are all the German city states. And the
> 
> |> shifting borders of Poland. (cal -s country) is a mighty
> 
> |> low-res "solution" to the Julian/Gregorian problem.
> 
> |
> |Several of these small entities, adopting the Gregorian calendar at
> |different times, you can see in this lenghty list:
> | https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorianischer_Kalender#Übernahme_de\\
> | s_gregorianischen_Kalenders
> |(in German)
> 
> But mostly is Katholischer Teil (Corpus Catholicorum) early (a
> year late) / Evangelischer Teil (Corpus Evangelicorum) of the
> Heiliges Römisches Reich (holy roman empire) später (18.2. ->
> 
> 1.3.1700). I would say, dependent on where you are, saying goes
> for the former or the latter to this very day. Aka i think
> i recall that posted to a similar thread in the past, quoting an
> article from the german computer magazine c't 15/1997, back from
> when i still gave (lots of diversely spread) money to german
> journalists; that i just pasted documentation comments, and that
> included (it included Gaius Julius Caesar back then i think)
> 
> * Whereas (parts of \ldots) Germany, for example, adopted it in 1700 (i think),
> * Great Britain did so in 1752;
> * many countries adopted it in between 1912 and 1974, on the other hand.
> 
> and
> 
> * Furthermore, DateTime describes itself as a set of date algorithms,
> * which are influenced by Timezone (and sometimes Locale) objects.
> * This implies that we don't know much of the country or region;
> * the timezone "Europe/Berlin", for example,
> * applies to all of Germany \e today,
> * which cannot be compared to the bunch of principalities which existed in the
> * year 1700!
> 
> Now again, what a pity.
> 
> I think it is remarkable as traditionally we kept it "holding on
> the inside", ie working ourselves out with all the little states,
> borders, taxes, etc., with a little bit of swinging and such
> dependent on "good king / bad king" time passages. Except for
> maybe the crusades (though good kings died before reaching the
> holy land imho), but even those came to an end at times. Bring
> the boys back home! (Which rhymes to bring the boys' backbone, in
> respect to the "traditional german burial" Mos Teutonicus. Hihi.)
> 
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)

Well and I would have to wonder how much the average person at the time was really tuned in with the calendars, years, etc.  The church with their meticulous record keeping would've cared, as well as scientific circles (whose lines with the church were much blurrier then), but your average peasant in the field probably didn't care one way or another, so it seems like adoption of calendars at the time would've had a lot more to do with political/religious affiliation than any amount of impact on the life of an average subject.

All that to say, unlike today's modern interconnected global community, back then it was probably fine to drag your feet on moving to some new calendar because most folks weren't looking that granularly at the calendar, they were looking at the sun, moon, and stars.  Of course I wasn't there, so this is all postulation, and certainly adrift from the original question so I'll resist further musings on German calendar adoption.

To tie it back, has anyone experience with cal(1) being retooled for non-western calendars, and if so, if similar problems have arisen?  One country I could see being troublesome to target cal(1) for is Japan, their traditional concept of a year consists of two values, one being which emperor was on the throne and the other being the number of years since the ascension.  In conventional date writing, they tend to only write the latter, mentioning the empire in the greater context to give a point of reference sure, but as a pointed example, the date stamps in the headers of several Japanese video games published in the 80s instead have a year in the 60s because it was 60 or so years after the ascension of Hirohito marking the Showa period.

- Matt G.