Coscivian calendar

One of the most striking features of the Coscivian calendar system is its intricacy. It offers a multi-dimensional method of structuring time, combining information about lunar days, solar days, lunar months, solar months, the movements of the Sun and the Moon in relation to stellar constellations, and other astronomically defined time spans. This makes the Coscivian calendar vastly more complex than the Occidental calendars, which are built primarily around two basic units of time: solar days and solar years. To complicate things even further, there is not one single Coscivian calendar. Different sub-cultures and regions use their own variant of the classical system. The Federalist Calendar or Rektaséga Calendar, the official standardized calendar of the Kiravian Federacy since 17XY, represents but one of many variations of the Coscivian calendar. Still, there are some features that are common to all or most variants. These are presented below.

— Sithney McCormick, Coscivian History for Dummies

This article will discuss the Rectified Imperial Calendar, which serves as the civil calendar of the Kiravian Federacy. Nonstandard Coscivian calendars continue to govern the rhythms of community life in many traditional rural areas of Kiravia or remain in use for ritual purposes, but in modern times none rival the prominence of the Rectified Imperial Calendar, to the point that modern Coscivians and Occidentals alike know it as simply the Coscivian calendar.

Principles

The Coscivian calendar is a lunisolar calendar. Lunar months have been the essential unit of social timekeeping in Coscivian an pre-Coscivian societies since time immemorial. The Coscivian family of calendars is designed first and foremost to calibrate cycles of lunar months to the solar year and its corresponding seasonal changes. This is accomplished by the intercalation of an extra month to some years according to a slightly refined Metonic cycle.

Months

Tova-axirasarov - (Ænglish: "Women's History Month") - Added to the calendar by Prime Executive Térunbuir at the behest of the Party of Kiravian Women. However, subsequent refinements of the computational method used to calculate the vernal equinox have rendered it mathematically impossible for Tova-axirasaro to occur.

Weeks

The week is not itself an integral component of the Coscivian calendar. The standard seven-day week has became firmly established in the Coscivian world with the adoption of Christianity, though a faint echoes of earlier five-day and six-day weekly patterns are evident in the rhythms of rural life and the timing of many recurring events. The names of the days of the week are not standardised, even within indiviual sprachräume. This state of affairs is perpetuated by the fact that in Coscivian-script texts, days of the week are almost always written with translingual logograms and understood by the reader as corresponding to whichever name is most familiar to them.

A table showing several common naming schemes for the days of the week in Kiravic alone illustrates this variance:

Year numbering

The two most common numbering schemes for years of the Coscivian calendar are absolute numbering, which locates a given year within the matrix of cosmic cycles, an relative or linear numbering, which locates a given year relative to an epochal moment in time.

For many civic purposes, such as the dating of laws, decrees, patents, charters, court documents, civil registers, etc., regnal years are used. Currently, regnal years are counted from the installation of the (Green) Marble Emperor in 1752 AD. After winning the Kiravian Civil War, the Kirosocialist Party began a new era dated from the declaration of the Kiravian Union. Uptake of the new era was very slow outside of the Party apparatus, and , out of necessity, official documents at all but the highest levels of government continued to be dual-dated until the early 1970s AD. By the time of Kiravian Unification, only the youngest generation born in the Kiravian Union was thoroughly habituated to revolutionary years. It is not uncommon for local authorities in South Kirav to use White Marble Emperor regnal years as a political statement.