ah, now I got what you said.
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Doesn’t the Islamic, Jewish, Chinese cultures all use the new moon as the start of the new month.
I know this by looking at the Jewish Calendar and by looking at my Father in law’s Chinese Almanac. Heck everything from buying a house to naming a baby is in that thing.
But the question is this. The Chinese New Year is filled with things to do and stories to hear.
Where the Monster Nian went rampaging and was chased away had to take place or if not true had to be created some place. Traditions on how to set the table, clean the house, not clean the house etc. have to have been written or started in some place. Why not give those people the credit. They owned the copyright regardless. Maybe even a TM.
No one is going to blow a Rams Horn During Chinese New Year or dip Apples in Honey. They are not going to sing Auld Lang Syne.
Anyway… I like 'em all. I’ll go to any party. I’ll stick with Happy New Year.
Edit: I seem to recall a story about a European meeting an American Indian (if you can call them that) for the first time. The Indian said that he had contact with the “paleface” before but did not know exactally when. He spoke the western language and said “many moons ago”. So it must be safe to say all cultures noticed the phases of the moon somewhat coincided with the changes in the yearly cycle. God gave us the first clock. The earth on the other hand was the second version of the super computer to find out the answer to life the universe and everything. But each computer needs a clock, of course.
The issue here is that plenty of non-Chinese people who celebrate new years on the same day because they too use a variation of the Von Bell calendar. Vietnam’s Tết, Korea’s Seollal, Tibet’s Losar, Mongolia’s Tsagaan Sar are all on the same day. Thus it’s not exclusively a Chinese new year.
It’s even more ridiculous for Chinese people to get outraged by someone referring to it as the lunar new year, which it obviously is, albeit equally inaccurate. Perhaps if we call it the lunisolar new year, then we can avoid the confusion with Jewish or Islamic lunar new years.
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Apparently we’re supposed to call him Schall von Bell, not just von Bell. God knows how he got a surname like that.
I swear, I just read some New Ager talking about her “Saturn return” (i.e., her 30th birthday–yeah yeah, I know, but close enough.)
My bad. Maybe his family talked really loud.
For years I was calling the creator of Sherlock Holmes by the double-barreled surname “Conan Doyle,” but it turns out that was a bit of an affectation on his part. Conan was just his middle name, we should all be calling him “Doyle.”
Just because a calander year is not accurate does not mean it is not a year. The gregorian calendar year is not a perfectly accurate reflection of the astronomical year either. A year is still a year though. It is still the time it takes for the earth to complete one cycle around the sun.
If i measure my height using say carrots, i am still measuring my height. Im not measuring my carrots.
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This “issue” comes up in a lot of things when it comes to Chinese. Ever since the seventies when I was a young kid reading Free China magazine in the public library, I became aware of this issue…
XYZ is a product of the Chinese people and by doing 123 to XYZ you desecrating XYZ and irreparably hurting the feelings of and slandering the Chinese People.
I believe they were trying this with everything from food to how to teach and use Chinese words. I think they’ve gone so far as trying to copyright the idea of the Chinese language to take control away form alternate schools like Taiwan and the people who prefer to use traditional Chinese…
But, I guess she can say Lunar Near Year if she wants to but, in her heart I bet she is thinking of the Chinese Stories and Chinese Traditions she is doing.
As far as I know, the Jewish Calendar and the Chinese Calendar are both Solar Lunar Calendars.
As you know the lunar month is 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 3 seconds long (Wikipedia), a little shorter than the solar month. So, un-corrected the important seasonal holidays would creep around the year and people would eventually be celebrating summer holidays in the middle of winter.
The Jewish Calendar adds an extra month every so often called Adar 2. My Chinese friends tell me the Chinese calendar also does this. It seems the Islamic Calendar has a way of juggling the number of days of each month to also correct for difference and put the calendar back in sync with solar time.
Thanks for the side reading about “von Bell”. No I have some fun facts to needle those Chinese purists who think at least their calendar is not a product of western influence. I wonder what percentage of the Chinese calendar is a product of Western influence.
The chinese calander defines the new year in terms of the summer and winter solstices and the phases of the moon. It doesnt creap around the year because the winter and summer solstices are always in winter and summer.
Nor is it a coincidence that the English word for month is also (etymologically) the word for moon. 
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/month#Etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/menstruate#Etymology
@Liam_Og Imagine a world in which adulthood is measured in height, but for some purposes (say, voting) it’s measured in cm, and for others (say, drinking) it’s measured in carrots.
You would then have people congratulating you twice for reaching the height of majority, but one time would be for your cm majority, and the other time would be for your carrot majority.
But there’s no such thing as carrot majority! Majority just means adulthood, and carrots don’t measure anything consistently! 
(There was a film ten-odd years ago in which an Israeli teenager from a highly religious family wanted to change her name as soon as she became an adult, but when she applied she found out she was still a minor by the secular calendar. It had never occurred to her that she had to pay attention to the difference.)
Humans are chronically incapable of devising and implementing a perfect system for anything. (My species is not much better, frankly.) A word means whatever it means in a given context. 
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It might not appear like that in the discussion, but this is exactly how I look at it. My point basically is “get off the high horse of whatever term you happen to prefer, it is no more correct than any other term.” Directed at “lunar” cause thats the one that seemed to be on the horse.
“Majority” technically means you have lived half your life. So you won’t really know if you were an adult until you’re dead.
明白了. Now where are our brave Anglo-Saxon warriors when we need them to defend the purity of the English moon from the Roman Empire’s subversive luna? 
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Saving Na’vi of course.
Say what?