Ghyll:Encyclopedant Calendar
To nurture the creation of a Ghyll Encyclopedia that will be of use to all of Ghyll's citizens, the Encyclopedants--key editors, and instigators of the encyclopaedic effort--are taking certain measures to ensure that some regional variations are normalised to canonical systems. One of the regional variations that the Encyclopedants have felt it foremost necessary to address is that of dates and times.
What this means to scholars is that when you submit entries that contain dates and times in a regional system, you will be asked (if we can get a message back to you) to provide them instead in the Encylopedant Calendar. It is the aim of this notice to define that calendar, and provide you with tips on the conversion. Should it be impossible for you to be contacted, the Encyclopedants will take up the changes themselves, attempting to provide normalisations where possible, and omitting dates otherwise.
The Encyclopedant Calendar
The Encyclopedant Calendar (EC) is based on years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. There are sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours to a day, seven days to a week, four weeks to a month, and a dozen months to a year. Hence there are three hundred and thirty six days in a year, as corresponds with a full rotation of our seasons.
The epoch for the Encyclopedant Calendar, i.e. 0 EC, is based on the date that the call for entries was first set forth over the fair lands of Ghyll. Hence, the first year of the creation of the Ghyll Encyclopedia will take place throughout 0 EC. Since scholars will generally be mentioning dates only when they have occured before the creation of the dictionary, it is expected that dates prior to 0 EC will be most heavily represented in entries: the syntax for doing so is to use a negative number for the amount of years. Note that -1 EC is the year before the creation of the Ghyll Encyclopaedia. It is expected that the first round of definitions for the twenty six letters of the alphabet will take one EC year to complete, and hence the next time we call for definitions of words beginning with "A" is predicted to occur at the start of 1 EC.
To identify a Ghyll month, use the year followed by a slash followed by the number of the month. Likewise, for a day, use the year followed by a slash followed by the number of the month followed by another slash followed by the day. Example: the fifth day of the seventh month of -20 EC would be written as -20/7/5 EC.
Ghyll Timeline
In order to aid scholars' abilities to convert their regional dates into EC, the Encyclopedants have taken it upon themselves to research the dates for the events described in the first set of entires received for the letter "A". It has been a painstaking and laborious process, but it should enable scholars to more easily research the EC date for events that they describe. The timeline is as follows:
| Date | Ghyll Event |
|---|---|
| -????? EC | The Avazian civilization falls. |
| -10,000,000 EC | Common ancestors to Ghyll humanoids and Burnflies roam the planet. |
| -900 EC | The Nitenmangrey culture became extinct. |
| -300 EC | Andelphracia and Quezlar 6 were active in this period. |
| -280 EC | Arariax the poet was born in the Evesque Valley. |
| -??? EC | The Brothers of the Lantern school is established (exact date unknown). |
| -200 EC | Historical records start to become difficult to decipher. |
| -150 EC | Earliest known use of the phrase "Andelphracian Lights". |
| -100 EC | The Brothers of the Lantern begin to specialize in four classical subjects. |
| -70 EC | Two transcriptions of the Echecharion are known to exist. |
| -62/7/11 EC | Birth of Baron Claude Lloyd Albert Smallwood. |
| -58 EC | Birth of Windsor Creame. |
| -58 EC | Birth of Qwentyth Pyre, scholar. |
| -46 EC | Brother (of the Lantern) Honuphrius denounces Arariax's early and middle poems. |
| -20 EC | Death of Edvard von Craghelm. |
| -18 EC | Birth of Gibbous Saunders. |
| -11 EC | Doggerel plague sweeps parts of Ghyll. |
| -13 EC | Folktown Records weekly newspaper founded, 22nd March. |
| -8 EC | Birth of Morphous Ibb. |
| -8 EC | Windsor Creame weds Bavarian Creame. |
| 0 EC | Ghyll Encyclopedia founded. |
Folktown Records History
From the first set of entries received for the Encyclopaedia, it is clear that many dates are stated indirectly using Folktown Records edition numbers. Since the Folktown Records has only been running since -13 EC, this only works for recent events, but those are the events most relevant to the inhabitants of Ghyll today, and the Folktown Records are common and popular enough that we can expect more excerpts from them in entries to come. As the editions of Folktown Records have been produced without fail every week from -13/3/22, we can provide the following dates for landmark issues:
| Date | Folktown Records Event |
|---|---|
| -13/3/22 EC | The 1st edition of the Folktown Records (FR1). |
| -12/4/1 EC | The 50th edition of the Folktown Records (FR50). |
| -12 EC | Windsor Creame joins the writing staff. |
| -11/4/15 EC | The 100th edition of the Folktown Records (FR100). |
| -9/5/15 EC | The 200th edition of the Folktown Records (FR200). |
| -8/6/1 EC | The 250th edition of the Folktown Records (FR250). |
| -7/6/15 EC | The 300th edition of the Folktown Records (FR300). |
| -7/9/15 EC | Gibbous Saunders writes to FR312. Managing Editor: Garth Haversham. |
| -5/7/15 EC | The 400th edition of the Folktown Records (FR400). |
| -3/8/15 EC | The 500th edition of the Folktown Records (FR500). |
| -1/4/1 EC | Morphous Ibb writes to FR578. Tim Timperton responds. |
| -1/9/15 EC | The 600th edition of the Folktown Records (FR600). |
| 0/1/1 EC | Ghyll Encyclopedia founding coincides with FR614. |
Note also that the following dates are currently unknown:
- Mr. Bowers had a series entitled "Ersatz Bite: False Teeth through Time" published.
- The current owners of the Folktown Records are of the Amphitheatre Elite.
