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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

I just saw this on social media the other day:

Person A: "Isn't it just awful that SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember and DECember aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months?"

Person B: "They should stab whomever changed that."

(For those who may not know, that is a reference to Julius Caesar who inserted July, and if you didn't know that you may be interested to know that Augustus inserted August. Hence we are off by 2 months.)

Edit: Apparently, I -- and the very funny person B -- were misinformed. Jan and Feb were inserted, and different months were renamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar

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This isn’t actually true, July and August were renamed from Quintilis and Sextilis. The off-by-two is because the original roman calendar had ten months, with winter not having named months. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar)

I'm not sure this is correct; July and August were renamed, yes, but not inserted. They did steal days from February, which was originally the last month of the Roman calendar.

Ah yes, you are correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar

So Jan and Feb were inserted.

I have to leave the original up as it is because the joke is too good, but I will leave this note as a correction.

It's not so much "inserted", as they just changed which month they considered the first. The roman first month was March, but it still took place in the spring.

They were inserted. Previously the months ran from March to December and the remaining time didn't belong to any month.

Caesar and Augustus didn't insert those months, they were renamed from Quintilis and Sextilis in their honour.

The reason for the discrepancy in names is due to the fact that March used to be the first month of the year. It was changed to January hundreds of years before Caesar came along, so the naming scheme was already 2 months off by that point.

> March used to be the first month of the year. It was changed to January hundreds of years before Caesar came along

Depends on your perspective. In the US (really, in Britain), this change occurred during the lifetime of George Washington, who arguably lived hundreds of years after Caesar.

and our (UK) tax system still hasn't caught up, starting on the 5th April.

They were not inserted, they were renamed. The year began in March, so the names of September-December make sense within that context. The start of the year changed later, making the names incorrect.

That made me chuckle, but apparently it’s a bit more nuanced. According to Wikipedia:

> It was named by the Roman Senate in honour of Roman general Julius Caesar, it being the month of his birth. Prior to that, it was called Quintilis, being the fifth month of the 10-month calendar.

This stuff is fascinating. Reminds me of how the Romance language weekdays are named after the Roman pantheon and the Germanic (including English) weekdays are named after the approximate germanic counterparts for those same Roman gods.

The Sanskrit names for the days of the week are named after the same planets. I think both the Indians and the Graeco-Romans originally got them from the Babylonians who were the authority for all things astronomical and astrological in the ancient world.

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