Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
Didn't Pope Gregory add in some more changes later as well? Prior to Julius Dec. was the 10th month as well I think. In fact Dec. is the start of words like Decimal (as in decimal system) which is our base 10 number system.
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That was the minor tweak. The Julian calendar had a leap year every four years. This leads to a slight excess, which was corrected by the Gregorian calendar reform by abolishing the leap year once per century, unless the century was a multiple of 400. That is, in the Julian calendar, 1500, 1600 and 1700 would all be leap years. In the Gregorian calendar, 1600 was still a leap year, but 1500 would not have been a leap year, and 1700 wasn't a leap year.
And yes, September, October, November and December were named for 7, 8, 9 and 10 in Latin. Two new months, January and February, were added after the names were fixed, but long before the Julian calendar reform (Before there was January and February, the Roman year started with March in the spring equinox and ran until December at the winter solstice, and then had a variable number of days that weren't assigned to any month until the following March.)
July and August are named after Julius Caeser and Augustus Caeser. Before their names changed, the months were called Quintilis and Sextilis (from 5 and 6 in Latin).