User:MeliSiliwa/nasin tenpo penpo

From sona pona, the Toki Pona wiki

nasin tenpo penpo, sometimes called ilo penpo or ilo Kamalu, is a Toki Pona calendar system developed primarily by meli Siliwa and presented during suno pi toki pona 2024. It aims to reduce the reliance on numbers as when adapting the Gregorian calendar, and instead uses non-numeric phrases.

Creation

nasin tenpo penpo was developed in ma pona pi toki pona as a random thought by meli Siliwa on 25 July 2024, from which most of its most important features were formed. It was packaged and presented on suno pi toki pona at 16:20 UTC.

Notable contributors to the project include ijo Stella, who came up with the concept of penpo weeks and named the weekday sequence; jan Telen, who introduced the "as little numbers as possible" idea and also helped with a lot of workshopping; and telo Ipi, who named the months, ordered the small cycle in order of evolution and calculated all of the sheets (sans 2024) for the first "generation" of years (2001 - 2030). jan jami is also notable for making a different nasin tenpo (a clock instead of a calendar) which is now officially connected to nasin tenpo penpo.

The calendar recieved an overhaul on 27 August, which included a change to penpo, both in regards to criticism of the serious use of the unserious word, and to divorce the calendar from the official tenpo penpo events in ma pona (since keeping penpo would make it either very inaccurate or too complicated as lunar calendars cannot be easily predicted.). All previous uses of the word penpo were renamed to mun, sans the name. This is the current version of the calendar as of September 2024.

Description

sike tenpo

nasin tenpo penpo has two year cycles, similar to the function of the Chinese zodiac. There is an inner cycle based on the 6 common nonhuman animal words—kala, pipi, akesi, soweli, waso, kijetesantakalu—and an outer cycle based on 5 degrees of "progress"—sin, kama, awen, tawa, weka. Each phase of the progress cycle contains a full animal cycle. These are then compounded to form the year name. The year kala sin corresponds to 2001 (±30n years), based on the start of the pre-pu era.

sike mun

nasin tenpo penpo uses lunar inspired weeks, revolving around ma pona pi toki pona's tenpo pi toki pona taso event (humorously dubbed tenpo penpo by some speakers) which occurs every new or full moon. The weeks have 15 days, each named after an issue of lipu tenpo, excluding words that could be confused for other things (animals, numbers, joke entries, etc.)—kasi, pan, kule, toki, moli, lete, walo, nimi, seli, moku, kulupu, musi, mama, nasin, and mun (formerly penpo).

For the sake of slightly keeping up with the moon cycle, every fourth week, the day moli is skipped (going straight from toki to lete) to make one 14-day week. Despite this change, the day of mun doesn't always line up with the new and full moons, due to their unpredictable nature.

kipisi tu tu wan

The year is split up into five 73-day-long months. These are named after 5 body parts from top to bottom—lawa, sijelo, luka, poka, noka.

A leap day occurs in each year prior to a Gregorian-calendar leap year (so the 2024 leap day would happen in waso tawa instead of kijetesantakalu tawa). It takes the form of an extra day in the month of poka, giving it 74 days instead of 73. However, no specific day in poka is considered the leap day.

Because of the length of the months, the first day of luka always lands on January 1st, as it falls 146 days after August 8th, as found by telo Ipi.

toki

Since a maximum of 5 weeks can fit in one month, you can use numbers up to 5 (or 4 for specific days like moli, or 6 in extremely specific circumstances) to talk about a specific day and week at the same time (suno pan nanpa tu wan, suno mun nanpa luka, suno mama nanpa wan, etc.). These can also reuse the 5-word "degrees of progress" sequence—sin, kama, awen, tawa, weka, and namako only when the month has 6 repetitions of a day due to a leap day. (suno pan awen, suno mun weka, suno mama sin, etc.). Its is important to mention that this system follow the color pattern in the official sheets and aren't an exact 1-to-1 replacement to the numbers. For example, if a month starts on toki, "kule sin" would refer to the kule at the very bottom of the month before it rolls back into the next month.

As with much of toki pona, you only need to label as much information as you think you'll need to be understood! If someone only tells you the date, you can assume they're talking about the current month and year, or a month and year that's been previously specified. If you aren't sure, ask!

For naming the calendar without the use of penpo, the name Kamalu [kala awen mun ale lipu utala] can be used—in reference to a now-uncanonized nimi sin created to refer to anything relating to the calendar, similar to pu, ku and su, coined from the Arabic name القمر (Qamar), meaning moon or cellestial light—like ilo Kamalu (the calendar) and kulupu Kamalu (used in the official sheets to refer to the group of people who helped workshop the calendar)

Resources

Retrieved from "https://sona.pona.la/wiki/User:MeliSiliwa/nasin_tenpo_penpo?oldid=19961"