[LEAPSECS] The relation between calendars and leap seconds.

[John Cowan]

Clive D.W. Feather scripsit:


> With two-bis being the misinterpretation of "every four years" in the

> Julian calendar, so that Feb 29th was added every *three* years for some

> time (Wikipedia suggests the most likely sequence was 44, 41, 38, 35, 32,

> 29, 26, 23, 20, 17, 14, 11, 8 BC, then a hiatus to correct the problem,

> then AD 4, 8, 12 etc.).


A natural mistake for the Romans, who seem to have made such fencepost
errors a convention:  their eight-day market week was called the
"nundinae", from "novem diem", and although December 31 was sensibly
"the day before the kalends of January", December 30 was "the third day
before the kalends of January", and so on back.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There are
no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that
they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. --The Hobbit