But before I go further, I will have to tell you that February used to be 29 days on a normal year and 30 days on a leap year.... I know you're surprised to hear that and probably doubting it, but it's true, so true that I will tell you the reason why it's loosing a day further.
But before that, let me take you through the history of calendar. The term calendar itself is taken from calendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar , related to the verb calare "to call out", referring to the "calling" of the new moon when it was first seen. Latin calendarium meant "account book, register" (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month). The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calender by the 13th century (the spelling calendar is early modern).
Calendars in antiquity were usually lunisolar , depending on the introduction of intercalary months to align the solar and the lunar years. This was mostly based on observation, but there may have been early attempts to model the pattern of
intercalation algorithmically, as evidenced in the fragmentary 2nd-century Coligny calendar . Nevertheless, the Roman
calendar contained very ancient remnants of a pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year.
The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE. The Julian calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon but simply followed an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years. This created a
dissociation of the calendar month from the lunation. The Gregorian calendar was introduced as a refinement of the Julian calendar in 1582 and is today in worldwide use as the de facto calendar for secular purposes.
But before the Julian calendar was reformed by Gregorian calendar, there has been changes made in the early Roman empire to the calendar before its final reformation. The Julian calendar used to alternate 31 days and 30 days in each month (ie. March 31 days, then April 30 days and so on) till August happened.
Yes August happened. August used to be 30 days, September 31 days and February 29 days (normal year) and 30 days (leap year). This changes occurred when emperor Augustus (Julius Caesar' grand nephew) defeated Marc Anthony and Cleopatra and became emperor of Rome, the Roman
Senate decided that he too should have a month named after him. The month Sextillus (sex = six) was chosen for Augustus, and the senate justified its actions in the following resolution:
Whereas the Emperor Augustus Caesar, in the month of Sextillis . . . thrice entered the city in triumph . . . and in the same month Egypt was brought under the authority of the Roman people, and in the same month an end was put to the civil wars; and whereas for these reasons the said month is, and has been, most fortunate to this empire, it is hereby decreed by the senate that the said month shall be
called Augustus.
Not only did the Senate name a month after Augustus, but it decided that since Julius's month, July, had 31 days, Augustus's month should equal it: under the Julian calendar,
the months alternated evenly between 30 and 31 days (with the exception of February), which made August 30 days long. So, instead of August having a mere 30 days, it was lengthened to 31, preventing anyone from claiming that Emperor Augustus was saddled with an inferior month. To accommodate this change two other calendrical adjustments were necessary:
The extra day needed to inflate the importance of August was taken from February, which originally had 29 days (30 ina leap year ), and was now reduced to 28 days (29 in a leap year). Since the months evenly alternated between 30 and 31 days, adding the extra day to August meant that July, August, and September would all have 31 days. So to avoid three long months in a row, the lengths of the last four months were switched around, giving us 30 days in
September, April, June, and November.
Now, I believe your doubt is cleared. Tell me what you think.
February don suffer
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