The first calendar that humans used was the Moon. They looked up at the sky and he noticed the regularity of the phases of the Moon.
Even the native Americans had a lunar calendar and they were cut off from the civilization of Eurasia.
Right now there are at least three major cultures using the Lunar Calendar.
The Islamic Calendar which is purely a lunar calendar.
The Chinese calendar and the Hebrew calendar.
In researching this subject I found out that the native Americans also have a current calendar which uses 13 moons.
Anyway the celebrations we are having now are basically the Chinese New Year with Chinese traditions and Chinese rituals.
The other countries may also celebrate a similar New Year but is not the Lunar New Year.
Calling it The Lunar New Year, in my opinion, would take away from uniqueness of the countries like Vietnam or Korea and other cultures that celebrate similar things.
When I was doing a report in Junior High in English, I called it the lunar new year.
In fact, the calendar system based on the lunar cycle has always been referred to as é°ć Yin calendar in Chinese, Yin is the moon, as opposed to Yang being the sun. So it has always been the lunar calendar.
The question should really be when did they start calling it the Chinese new year. My guess is itâs the same reason why âa lunar new yearâ changed to âthe lunar new yearâ. Since now there is another ânew yearâ, they needed to specify itâs âthe lunar oneâ or âthe Chinese oneâ.
By the way, after the fall of the Song dynasty, Chinese astronomy basically died with the Mongol invasion. For a long time people couldnât accurately predict before hand the date of the new year, which is the first new moon after winter solstice. So people just used the winter solstice as the new year. Thatâs why you would still sometimes year âyou are one year older after the winter solstice (or after you eat tangyuan)â.
By the way, they actually even had difficulties determining the solstices, as they still believe the way to measure when solstice happens is by the Qi of the earth blowing up ash from a particular length of tube in the ground. So even the date of the winter solstice they used was questionable.
It wasnât until the Jesuits missionary arrived and fixed the calendar that the Chinese had something that resembled a working calendar again.
Sure why not, just like saying âthe Fourth of Julyâ invalidates similar holidays in Rwanda and the Philippines, right?
Or saying âIâm going to take the subwayâ takes away from other cities that also have subways, yeah?
This is the first year I tried calling it LNY instead of CNY. I refused to call it anything but CNY before because I had a professor of Tibetan history (from Tibet) who told us that Tibetâs Lunar New Year was often in March, not Jan/Feb like Chinaâs. In that case, even within Asia, The Lunar New Year is not the same thing as Chinese New Year. Calling it âChinese New Yearâ when youâre actually referring to non-Chinese countries (and both dates and traditions are not the same as China, which in and of itself is not actually one monolithic nation), is an insult to those other cultures. At the same time, what the West has gotten up in arms about (âitâs not just Chinaâs, all of Asia is celebratingâ) is false. The vast, overwhelming majority of âlunar new yearâ festivities in the West are China-centric. Virtually no one is celebrating Vietnamese or Korean or any other countryâs LNY traditions. Theyâre learning about hongbao, looking at ćĽčŻ and eating fish, which sounds like âsurplusâ in Mandarin Chinese. Thatâs Chinese New Year.
Edit: in 500 years, it wonât matter what itâs called, just as Christians run around screeching about how âJesus is the reason for the seasonâ in December, even though absolutely NOTHING about Christmas has anything to do with Jesusâs birth, right down to when his birthday was alleged to be.
Iâve started it calling it lunar new year over the last year or two. Except for when I talk with Chinese , cos it is their Chinese new year.
The lunar calendar was the farmers calendar.
So you will see farmers in Ireland consulting Old Mooreâs Almanac and also many farmers and religious types use the lunar new year in Taiwan also.
Edit - I didnât realize this almanac is an Irish thing and Old Moore was some kind of genius way back when. What a nameâŚTheophilus Moore .
publication for the agricultural community in rural Ireland. Farmers and fishing folk of the day found the tables of moon and tide times, and transport information, among other useful information very handy on a daily basis
In pretty much every language, âmonthâ sounds like âmoonâ, just as the sun and the moon (Sunday, Monday) also tend to get their own days of the week. Humans have some pretty common tendenciesâŚ
Iâm just glad thereâs a term for it that doesnât have the word âChineseâ in it. It is celebrated in many countries that arenât China, including this one. Lunar works for me.
Thatâs mostly due to the rule difference regarding the placement of leap months.
No one would say âChineseâ new year in Chinese. Theyâd say stuff like 螲ćć°ĺš´, ćĽçŻ or other crap instead.
No. It was called the lunar calendar since the beginning. The term farmerâs calendar didnât become a thing until Gregorian calendar was adopted and people had to find a way to refer to the old calendar, and they disliked the term âold calendarâ.
Actually, the idea of calling it LNY is to break with all the âexclusivityâ of the celebration by China only and recognizing that this time of the year is celebrated by several other countries/cultures their own way.
By the way, donât get me started on the idiocy of the supposed âFarmer calendarâ.
Youâd be hard pressed to find any useful crop whose growth cycle bears any relation to the moon. Most of the plants depends on the sun for energy, so their cycles match the sunâs. Frankly so does most seasonal climate, since the sun is the main source of the Earthâs heat and thatâs the driving force of wind.
So whenever I hear Taiwanese farmers saying stuff like âwe only pick tea after May 5th on the lunar calendarâ, it sounds like complete madness to me.
Oh, and many of the users of the âFarmerâs calendarâ would tout about the usefulness and the genius of Jieqi (çŻć°Ł). Those are just the solar calendar. You had to look them up on the lunar calendar because they donât fall on the same date each lunar year. However, if you use the Gregorian calendar, they are the same every single year. The spring equinox would always fall on March 21 or 22.
The only reason the Chinese calendar transitioned from a pure lunar one (太é°ć) to a solar calendar jammed into the shape of a lunar calendar (é°é˝ĺć) was because people realized the moonâs phases donât exactly match the Earthâs orbit around the sun. So doing a pure lunar calendar would be a poor reference for agriculture needs in the long run.
No, the Lunar is around September. That is commonly called the Jewish New Year. That is the time religious Jews believe the world was created.
Is the Jewish Calendar a lunar calendar, yes. To Jews it is THE LUNAR New Year.
The Islamic Calendar according to Office Holidays âŚ
âMarks Islamic New Year and the Prophetâs journey from Mecca to Medina in 622AD.â
Is that not a lunar new year?
And letâs not forget about one of the many native American lunar calendars that all have other New Year.
I will respect each individual culture and I will call the Jewish New Year the Jewish New Year, the Chinese New Year, the Chinese New Year and so on. I will not use the words Lunar New Year.
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