every day's a holiday! » history

Secrets of Dating: Julian vs Gregorian calendars

sinestor — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:47:34 +0000

There is often a difference of 11 to 13 days between the date an event occurred in history and the date it is celebrated on the calendar today. This is due to a discrepancy that occurred in the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.

The Julian Calendar, named for Julius Caesar, called for an extra day (Leap Day) to be inserted once every four years, in order to keep consistent with the 365 & 1/4 day solar year.

It was a vast improvement over the previous Roman calendar, which drifted up to 100 days from the actual solar year. However even the Julian calendar wasn’t entirely accurate. The solar year is slightly less than 365 & 1/4 days. Not enough to notice at first. It took almost a century for the Julian Calendar to drift just one day from the solar year.

But by the 1500s people were starting to notice that the calendar was off by 11 days from the summer and winter solstice.

Astronomers calculated that to accurately mirror the solar year, one Leap Day had to be removed each century. In other words, each century should have 24 Leap Years rather than 25. The new calendar was called the Gregorian calendar, because it was installed under Pope Gregory’s Papacy in 1582 AD. [This is why years ending in ’00 no longer have Leap Days. (Except every 400 years which is why 2000 was a Leap Year. {Just don’t worry about it. You have better things to do with your brain power.}

Anyway to get rid of the 11 excess days that had accumulated over the previous 15 centuries Pope Gregory did just that. He tossed 11 days from the 1582 calendar. This means people went to bed on October 4th, 1582 and woke up on October 15th. (And you thought Daily Savings was a drag!)

It took Great Britain and its colonies another 200 years to adopt the Gregorian system and get rid of the 11 days. Russia didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918. Which is why the Russian “October Revolution” of 1917 took place on November 7 according to Western calendars.

It’s been suggested that the Austrians were annihilated at Napoleon’s Battle of Austerlitz because of the Julian vs. Gregorian calendar debacle. Reinforcements from Russia thought they had eleven extra days to make their rendezvouz with the Austrians.

So if you see holidays celebrated 11 to 13 days after the rest of the world, it’s because the Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrates according to their pre-Gregorian dates. (Christmas, Epiphany, New Year…)

And remember, if you ever miss a birthday by several days, just tell ‘em you’re on the Julian calendar. It’s old school.

Defenders of the Fatherland Day

sinestor — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:13:52 +0000

February 23

Today Russia celebrates Defenders of the Fatherland Day.

On February 23 (Julian Calendar) 1917, Russian women in Petrograd celebrated the 7th International Women’s Day. In response to food shortages caused by the war with Germany, the women of Russia’s capital city “poured onto the streets,” demanding “bread for our children” and “the return of our husbands from the trenches.”
(www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/womens-day.htm)

The protests gained momentum the following days when workers’ strikes forced the closure of hundreds of factories. On February 26 the Tsar, who was away conducting the war, ordered his general to disperse the demonstrators, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, saying such disturbances were “impermissible at a time when the fatherland is carrying on a difficult war with Germany.”
(Tony Cliff Lenin: All Power to the Soviets)

Russian troops fired on the crowds, killing dozens of protesters. But the real problem for the Tsar was that many of the Tsar’s troops refused to fire on crowds and sided with the strikers. The clashes of February 24-27 claimed about 1500 lives on both sides. In the end the Tsar lost the support of his own troops, was forced to abdicate his throne.

But that’s not why the Russians celebrate on February 23.

Nope, it’s because of what happened on February 23 the following year.

Nicholas II’s abdication gave way to a Russian Provisional Government, led by Social Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky. Under Kerensky the government declared Russia a republic, pronounced freedom of speech, made steps to encourage democracy, and released thousands of political prisoners.

But Kerensky, perhaps because he was the former Defense Minister, continued to keep the Russians engaged in the disastrous war against Germany. Bad move. Like the Tsar before him, the war would be his downfall.

Alexander Kerensky

How Russia got its Soviet:

The Russian word soviet meant “council.” Soviets were workers’ councils with little power, set up in the wake of 1905′s Bloody Sunday.

The Bolsheviks were an extremist minority party and as such could not hold much sway in a democratic assembly. Instead Lenin and the Bolsheviks bypassed the Provisional Government entirely and consolidated their power in these urban workers’ councils known as soviets, the most prominent one being the soviet in Petrogad.

In 1917 their platform called for the seizure of land, property and industry by the peasantry and workers, for the transfer of power to the local workers’ councils, and for the immediate end of war with Germany.

In April few took the Bolsheviks seriously.

By November they ruled the country.

What happened in 7 months?

Under Kerensky’s Provisional Government food and supply shortages worsened. Mass numbers of Russian soldiers continued to defect. And the drain of resources for the war effort strangled the economy. Even though most people were against the war, political parties would not withdraw. Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ opposition to the war bought them enough support to pull off the armed uprising later called the “October Revolution,” which occurred in—you guessed it—November. (Gregorian)

After the uprising the Bolsheviks put forth a resolution before the Provisional Government to transfer political power to the soviets.When the Provisional Government voted it down (What a surprise) the Bolsheviks walked out. The next day the Bolsheviks, with the support of 5,000 members of the Russian Navy in Petrograd, issued a decree dissolving the Provisional Government.

Lenin: Future's so bright, gotta wear shades

Lenin believed a standing army was a bourgeois institution and would not be necessary in a communist society; he was proved wrong. In order to ensure beneficial terms in an armistice with Germany, and facing a massive civil war, the Bolsheviks called for the establishment of a standing Workers’ and Peasants’ “Red” Army to replace the disintegrated Imperial Army.

The decree was issued on January 28. Ten days later on February 23* assemblies were held across the country to recruit soldiers for the new army. The “mass meetings brought 60,000 men into the Red Army in Petrograd, 20,000 in Moscow and thousands more in other places around the country.”

*(On February 1, 1918 Russia switched from the old Julian Calendar, abandoned by the West in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the Gregorian Calendar. As a result, the date February 1, 1918 in Russia was followed by February 14, 1918.)

February 23 was declared Red Army Day. It was changed to Soviet Army Day by Stalin. And to Defenders of the Fatherland Day following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Recently, according to dincarslan.blogspot.com…

“the long reaching poisonous arms of capitalism have found a new virgin field to exploit and made this day a “Men’s Day” where the women gives (or should give) gifts to their fathers, brothers, boyfriends and male colleagues.”

So, ironically, the date on which the Russians once celebrated women, February 23, is now a holiday extolling men.

Lyubov Tsarevskaya has a more traditional, patriotic view of the holiday:

“This is the ultimate reflection of one’s devotion and patriotism. As Jesus Christ said, Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13) The history of the army in Imperial, Soviet, and now, Russian times is replete in stirring examples of self-sacrifice and heroism.”

The Chechens regard February 23 in a remarkably different manner:

On Army Day Chechens Quietly Remember Mass Deportation

It Has Been 63 Years Since the Deporation of the Chechens and Ingush

A 2006 poster proclaiming “Congrats to the Russian Soldiers” mistakingly shows the USS Missouri.

Name 3 words that end in ‘gry’

sinestor — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:18:35 +0000

February 21

Language is the soul of a nation… Do you want to make a people disappear? Destroy its language.

Jules-Paul Tardivel, L’anglicisme, voila l’ennemi, 1880

Today is International Mother Language Day.

For some reason the excitement surrounding this occasion is not quite as intense as other more important holidays, such as Talk Like a Pirate Day. This may be because our national linguistic experience differs from most countries. As one joke goes:

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Trilingual.

What do you call someone who speaks one language?

American.

Even our neighbors to the north have had a very different outlook on language. In Canada there are laws monitoring the use of the French and English languages, down to the size of words on cereal boxes.

Conflicts between dueling languages (like the Quebecois woman who complained to a pet store owner that her parrot didn’t speak French) are not always trite. As Quebec’s Jean-Charles Harvey wrote:

In the middle of an ocean of English-speaking men and women, the only chance of survival for the French is if it becomes synonymous with audacity, culture, civilization and freedom.

Jean-Charles Harvey, La peur, 1945

+ + +

The origin of International Mother Tongue Day lies in the aftermath of the bloody partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The nation now known as Bangladesh was East Pakistan after the partition. Even though over half of Pakistan’s 69 million inhabitants lived in East Pakistan, the country was largely ruled from West Pakistan’s central government. In 1948 the central government declared Urdu as the nation’s only official language. This meant Bengali, the native language of over 90% of the people of East Pakistan (and thus one of the most spoken languages in the world) could not be taught in school or used in government affairs. The change also threatened to make the majority of educated people of East Pakistan essentially ‘illiterate’ and unable to participate in government or hold national posts.

This understandably outraged the East Pakistanis, and a Bengali Language Movement formed. Pakistani Governor-General Muhammed Ali Jinnah proclaimed that the Bengali language movement was a “fifth column” movement attempting to sabotage true Pakistani unity.

In February Dhaka University planned mass protest demonstrations, but the central government imposed a ban on all public assemblies in the city of Dhaka. On February 21 students held the protest anyway.

University of Dhaka demonstrators, Feb. 22, 1952

Police attacked the students with batons. Students fought back, throwing bricks at the police, who responded with tear gas and gunfire. Several students were killed. The outcry over the police attacks led to more demonstrations and violence over the following days. On February 22 police attacked a mourning rally, presumably for violating the ban on assemblies.

The government-censored news reports purported that the demonstrations were instigated by communists and Hindu foreign influences. After two more years of protest Pakistan passed a resolution accepting Bengali as a national language of Pakistan along with Urdu, and the anniversary of the first martyrs was adopted by UNESCO as International Mother Language Day in 1999.

The story of Bengali has been repeated, and preceded, by countless stories of language repression

In the twentieth century Spanish dictator Franco banned the Basque language—one of the oldest languages in the world—for thirty years, nearly destroying it. (Basque has no known linguistic relations, and as such is one of the four language families in Europe: the others being Indo-European, Uralic, and Turkic.)

Picasso's depiction of the bombing of Guernica

new-art.blogspot.com/2005/11/post-guernica-now.html

Of the over 6,000 recorded languages in the world today, less than 300 are spoken by populations of 1 million or more. Much like how McDonald’s and Barnes & Noble have driven out local restaurants and book stores, so the larger languages are replacing indigenous ones. According to the U.N. thousands of languages are in danger of extinction.

South America had an estimated 1,500 languages before European contact. Today it has 350. Strangemaps displays a map of the world (from Limits of Language by M. Parkvall) distorting the size of nations and continents by their linguistic diversity:

Linguistic map of the world

The lingual giant Papua New Guinea boasts some 850 languages. Countries in red speak over 200 languages.

The U.S. gets a bad rap for how few languages we speak, but as you can see, as a whole its inhabitants speak nearly as many as the entire European continent.<

Yesterday I drove through a stretch of Westminster, California that, I kid you not, was entirely in Vietnamese.

The most popular* languages in the world are:

Mandarin Chinese
Hindi
English
Spanish
Arabic
Russian
Portuguese

and the one that started today’s holiday: Bengali.

(*popular as in how many people speak them, not as in votes on Americal Idol)

Today’s language question: Name three words in English that end in “gry”

European Language Map

Also from Strange Maps:

Languages of Europe: Praise the Lord and Pass the Dictionary