Name for a "naive" timekeeping system?

Question

I am thinking of a "naive" timekeeping system of the sort I believe would be likely to be implemented by non-specialists.

• A day is exactly 24 hours. An hour is exactly 60 minutes. A minute is exactly 60 seconds. No exceptions (i.e. no Daylight Saving or leap seconds).
• A leap year occurs exactly once every four years: if the year modulo 4 equals 0, it is a leap year. The month lengths are the normal 31 days for January, 28 or 29 days for February, etc., that you would expect to find on a wall calendar.
• Days of the week, if they are used, are what you would get by taking your contemporary (late 1900's / early 2000's) wall calendar and, using the above rules for leap years and month lengths, extrapolating in both directions: if the calendar goes far back enough, February 29, 1900 exists and is a Wednesday; and if the calendar goes far forward enough, February 29, 2100 exists and is a Monday.

What name, if any, is used to describe precisely this system?

Answer 1

"naive" works for me.

Answer 2

A simplistic system.

Answer 3

I would go with "Incomplete"

Answer 4

How about "19th century timekeeping", since Daylight Saving Time was invented around the turn of the 20th century, and was not adopted by most countries until the late 1910s, and the concept of leap seconds was introduced in 1971?

Answer 5

What you're referring to is basically known as Calendar Reform. It has been tried many times, as I'm sure you're aware.

There is a book called Calendrical Calculations (this should be a link to the Google Books version)

The book, by Edward M. Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz discusses cultural differences between calendars at some length. I think you'll find some ideas for names in the book.

Answer 6

Although the book is over ten years old, I would strongly recommend reading Standard C Date/Time Library: Programming the World's Calendars and Clocks by Lance Latham. This is one of those books that you will pick back up from time to time in amazement that it got written at all. The author goes into more detail than you want about calenders and time keeping systems, and along the way develops the source code to a library (written in C) to handle all of the calculations.

Amazingly, it seems to be still in print...