On May 7, 2014, at 13:59, "Martin Holmes
gtxxgm-xsl-list-2(_at_)m(_dot_)gmane(_dot_)org"
<xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:
Hi Liam,
On 14-05-07 10:52 AM, Liam R E Quin liam(_at_)w3(_dot_)org wrote:
On Tue, 2014-05-06 at 23:50 +0000, Martin Holmes
gtxxgm-xsl-list-2(_at_)m(_dot_)gmane(_dot_)org wrote:
The proleptic Gregorian doesn't, I agree, make much sense when it's
extended this far back, but the project I'm working on is an early
modern one, and most of our date-conversion functions convert between
Julian and Gregorian.
It's worth mentioning for the sake of people thinking the Julian
calendar is convenient in general that different countries adopted the
Gregorian calendar at different times - as late as the 1930s for Greece,
1752 in the UK, 16th Century for much of Roman Catholic Europe, and an
even more complex picture in the Americas.
Yes, and even worse, the date of the beginning of the year varies even during
the time when Julian is used in a single country.
The other historical form commonly seen is to date events in terms of
people, usually monarchs. E.g. 3 Geo III would be the third year of the
reign of George III, although as far as I can tell the usual year end
was employed, so that the years were measured in England (say) from
April 1st, not from the coronation or accession date.
Yes, we have regnal dates too. Our normal procedure is to mark them up as
regnal dates, but supply TEI custom dating attributes specifying what they
would be in Julian; then the automated conversion is able to supply proleptic
Gregorian equivalents.
All the conversions are intended only as helpful information; they can't
usually be accurate, especially for dates in the first three months of the
year, because of the difficulty of knowing what year-end the writer happened
to be using.
Older dates tagged as Julian also come in for the
same conversion. You're right that it's ambiguous, though; this page:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proleptic_Gregorian_calendar> shows a
table in which 1BC Julian is equivalent to 1BC Gregorian, but it also
appears to suggest that ISO 8601 is somehow equivalent to proleptic
Gregorian.
It is also overly simplistic, for the reasons I already mentioned. Since
dates don't usually mention the calendar to which they conform, you have
to add context. And, of course, a visitor from France to England writing
home would most likely use the French calendar of the time, perhaps
eventually switching after staying in England more than a year or two.
There's a book on Calendrical Calculations, although I seem to remember
that it's awfully proprietary, in that the author claims ownership of
the algorithms. But it looked as if it might be helpful.
The resource we use most is:
Cheney, C.R. 2000. A Handbook of Dates for students of British history.
Revised by Michael Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
It's wonderfully detailed and unexpectedly enjoyable to read.
As is Calendrical Calculations [1]. I don't think that the algorithms are
proprietary. They run the emacs calendar, so FSF has copyright on that code.
Since they are in lisp it would be easy to put them into xslt if that hasn't
been done already.
Regards,
--Paul
[1] http://www.calendarists.com
Cheers,
Martin
Liam
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