[OB] What is a "month" on Roshar, anyway?

[Necessary Eagle]

Roshar has months. And Adolin and Shallan's discussion about "girl stuff" implies that periods also happen on a monthly basis.

Okay, but there are three moons in really fast orbits. How can they have "months" as we understand them? Let along months close enough to earth months that Rosharan ladies get visited by the red voidbringer once per?

[RShara]

Here's Karen Ahlstrom's post about the OB timelight, highstorms, and calendar.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/292-brandons-blog-2017/#e7833

Quote

A year has five hundred days, but there’s also a thousand-day cycle with different highstorms around the new year. In each year there are ten months of fifty days each. The months are broken into ten five-day weeks. The date indicates what year, month, week of the month, and day of the week it is and looks like this: 1173.8.4.3.

 

[Calderis]

Ten weeks, each consisting of five twenty hour days. 

Each Rosharan hour is 0.9636 earth hours. 

 

[Weltall]

A Rosharan 'month' is fifty days, divided into ten weeks of five each, and a year is ten months long. That a year is exactly five hundred days long is probably due to Adonalsium tweaking things Just So, and I suspect the exact division of month and week was arrived at because Vorin culture has a symmetry fetish. We don't know what calendar systems the non-Vorin cultures use so they might divide things up differently. Since Rosharan days are shorter than Earth ones (aka 'Cosmere standard' which is based on Yolen and by extension Scadrial) that actually tracks pretty closely.

I got curious about this when Jasnah mentioned Amaram being seven months in the womb during her verbal beatdown of the man, looked at what we know of Roshar's timekeeping and ran the numbers. They're closer than you'd think once you do the math, despite the gestation period on Roshar being seventy days longer than the average one here in the real world, assuming exactly seven local months is the Rosharan average.

Edit: Multiply ninja'd on the exact breakdown of days, weeks and months. xD

Edited January 4, 2018 by Weltall

[RShara]

So a month is about 40 of our days long if my math is right.

(.9636*20*50)/24 = 40.15

 

Over the course of thousands of years, their bodies probably adapted to the different planet and diurnal rhythms.

[Necessary Eagle]

edit: nvm i think i misremembered the book

Edited January 4, 2018 by Necessary Eagle