Rotterdam Monthnaming System
An original idea of naming Mars' months and weekdays, conceived by Frans Blok in 1999.
The Rotterdam System of naming months and weekdays appeared because of the not-so-easy-to-remember month names of the original Darian calendar (mixed Latin and Sanskrit names), and because the original might appear too cultural biased.
The Rotterdam System has the merit of being the first one to explore the original idea of inventing completely new names. A solution to month naming may be found in the fact that the number of 24 months is pretty close to the number of 26 letters in the Roman alphabet.
As some serious advantages, first, it would not favour one culture above others and it would avoid sensitivities that may exist around certain names. Second, it would be a nice push forward for Martian culture; now that almost everything on Mars has been named after places or people from Earth, it's time to invent some new names. Third, it creates an opportunity to make the built-in mnemonic system even more sophisticated, the names can be shaped in a way that they enhance the logical structure of the calendar (and making the names less arbitrary is an effective way to reduce the billions of possibilities you can get with just 24 characters).
Month names
It seems like a good idea to have Mars' variable orbital velocity reflected in the length of the names. Nobody has to know the order of the months by heart to realize that a short name must be a spring month. The rule of thumb for future generations of Martian schoolchildren will be "the names are fast when Mars is slow". The first seven months (spring in the north, fall in the south) have four characters and two syllables, numbers 8 through 13 (summer/winter) as well as 19 through 24 (winter/summer) count six characters and three syllables and months 14 through 18 (fall/spring) have eight letters and four syllables.
The months that are (or can be) one day shorter should have shorter names, so these are always one letter and one syllable shorter than the other ones in their season.
It was also considered a good idea for the naming system to emphasize that twenty-four can easily be divided in two groups of twelve, six groups of four, eight groups of three or twelve groups of two months. The letters R, A, N, I, L and O have been used as an ending character to indicate which position months have in a group of six. This means the 1st, 7th, 13th and 19th months end with R, the 2nd, 8th, 14th and 20th end with A, etc. It's always clear that, for example, months ending with N or O are the last month of a trimester. Note that this way all the odd months end with consonants and all the even months end with vowels.
The rhythm of four is supported by the D in every fourth month's name. Finally, the fall and winter months (in the northern hemisphere) have been made recognizable by putting a U in their names.
All this fixed quite a few characters, but left even more open. The blank spots have been filled with the sole purpose to create nice, pronounceable names, each as much as possible with a character of its own. To strengthen this character every possible combination of two vowels has been used only once.
| Season North / South </td> <th colspan="8"> Name | <th> Syllables </th> <th> Characters </th>
|---|
|
A |
X |
A |
T |
I |
S |
O |
L |
|
|
B |
E |
N |
A |
S |
O |
L |
|
|
C |
I |
P |
O |
S |
O |
L |
|
|
D |
O |
M |
E |
S |
O |
L |
|
|
E |
R |
J |
A |
S |
O |
L |
|
|
F |
U |
L |
I |
S |
O |
L |
|
G |
A |
V |
I |
O |
S |
O |
L |
External links and references
- This page was last edited on 21 January 2009, at 03:02.
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