Calendar and time

Eberban time system aims to provide powerful and consistent tools to speak about durations and calendars. However to provide that power and consistency they may not follow arbitrary conventions found in other languages.

Durations

Duration words allows to measure elpased time that may not be aligned to the calendar, such as the duration of a piece of music (3 minutes and 32 seconds). Since some units of measurements are based on calendar concepts that don’t have consistent duration, the duration expressed by those word is the set of acceptable values. Duration words also follow the number predicate structure (E is X times A) which allows to easily compose them with numbers or other units of measurement.

  • bire: E is 1 year (Gregorian Calendar) times A (default: 1)
  • gare: E is 1 month (Gregorian Calendar) times A (default: 1)
  • kora: E is 1 week (from Xday midnight to next Xday midnight) times A (default: 1)
  • dena: E is 1 day times A (default: 1)
  • sura: E is 1 hour times A (default: 1)
  • jero: E is 1 minute times A (default: 1)
  • vola: E is 1 second times A (default: 1)

To speak about milliseconds and smaller, use multiplication with vola.

vulu can be used to speak about the duration E of an event A.

Calendar events

Hours, minutes and seconds

Words for hours, minutes and seconds have the following meanings:

  • surai: Now is the hour E of A (default: day/denai).
  • jeroi: Now is the minute E of A (default: hour/surai).
  • volai: Now is the second E of A (default: minute/jeroi).

They are relative to the start of an event described by A, thus the “minute 0” is from the start of A to 1 minute (excluded) after. “Minute 15” is 15 minutes after the start of A to 16 minutes (excluded). A is a set of numbers that must all be consecutive integers, such as “Minutes 10 to 15” is an event spanning from 10 minutes after the start of A to 15 minutes. E can contain negative numbers, such as “Minute -2” is from 2 minutes before the start of A to 1 minute (excluded) before the start of A.

Calendar-aligned events

Concept of days, weeks, month and years are inherently speaking about events that are aligned with the calendar. “The first day of the festival” speaks about a day starting from midnight to the next midnight, even if the festival starts at 10.

Aside from this alignment detail, the following words works the same way as surai/jeroi/volai; which means the first day of the week/month/year is day 0, and the first month of the year is month 0. You should thus be careful when translating a date from and to Eberban.

  • birei: Now is year E of A (default: Gregorian Calendar). Year 1 is 1 AD, but year 0 is 1 BC and year -1 is 2 BC. This matches Astronomical year numbering.
  • garei: Now is month E of A (default: year/birei).
  • korai: Now is week E of A (default: year/birei). Weeks starts on Monday and end on Sunday.
  • denai: Now is the day E of A (default: month/garei).

Compounds of form e TI denai are defined for each day of the week, and have the same meaning as denai with this additional constraint that E is the particular day of the week.

Exemples

Telling the current time of the day:
a [se tie tu] jeroi [se te tio] surai
Now the minute 54 of the hour 17 (of a day)

Telling the current date:
a se ti e tia denai se tiu garei
Now is a Sunday, the day 0 of month 8 (September 1st)

a mi drie meon sri se te denai skun srui mi etiansa ze meon
I buy an apple, and tomorrow I will eat it.