Life and death and love and birth

[captlebubbles]

I've been thinking about it and I think a Discworld year might be longer than ours. Consider: there are eight days in a Discworld week, Sunday-Saturday and an Octoday as well, because Discworld is all about eight. That's fifty-two extra days in the year, assuming there's still fifty-two weeks in the year. Discworld also has extra months as well-

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

They seem to be developmentally at about the same age, or possibly younger (especially when they get older)? If the years are longer, they should be slightly older than us Roundworld people every year, and several years older by the time they reach middle-age? But the sixteen-year-olds seem sixteen, and the sixty-year-olds don't seem seventy.

Possibly they have fewer weeks and a lot of very short months?

[captlebubbles]

Hmm, maybe. And you're right about the sixty-year-olds- even not considering that Vimes just hit a point and refused to get any older, we have several characters who are in their fifties and sixties in the later books who don't seem to be.

Since Discworld is a mirror of worlds, maybe aging is a reflection of how people think of fantasy aging? Because Aragorn was eighty in the Rings trilogy, and humans in general tended to get old a lot slower than we do. And that crops up a lot in fantasy, so it could have been a reference to that.

They do seem to age just a little bit faster when they're young- Carrot was sixteen in Guards! Guards!, but he seemed at least a few years older. (Or possibly I'm just cynical about teenagers.)

[wolfy_writing]

Yeah, a lot of the older people could easily be ten years younger than their age, which could easily happen with a shorter year.

That could be it. A lot of fantasy has people living decades longer in magic worlds.

Carrot seemed huge and strong, but also naive enough that I had a hard time categorizing his age.

[captlebubbles]

I was thinking physically, yeah. Even when I knew teenagers who worked out all the time, none of them had anything like the muscle definition that Carrot did.

On the other hand, at three Young Sam was definitely three, and at six he was definitely six, and at nine Tiffany Aching was notably not "nine", while at thirteen the Baron's son was clearly thirteen. So I'm thinking maybe they start off aging normally, pick up a little bit quicker during their teens, level out during their twenties and thirties, and then slow down somewhere in their forties or fifties.

Also, a very stressful life makes you age faster at first, but after you hit your stride you find a stopping point and just stay there, rather than the way it works in our world where a stressful life makes you age faster and then keep right on aging faster until you've worked or worried yourself to death at an earlier age than you ought.

Unless you're a witch, in which case you're probably gonna age very quickly and then stop.

[uk_sef]

Historically, the length of months would largely depend on what their moon does in whizzing around the disc but also then on which political leaders were being demanding - at which point there's no real need for them to be anywhere near the same length as each other.

If *everything* was about eights, or at least in binary, then you'd need perhaps 16 months but they could have only 2 weeks (of 8 days = 16 days) each for a shorter 256 day year or exactly 4 weeks (ie 32 days) for a much longer 512 day year (which is 8 cubed).

[captlebubbles]

There's no need, but if Discworld is a mirror of our world then something ought to line up somewhere. I know in the dates that get mentioned I've never seen one go over thirty, but I wasn't paying attention so I could have just missed it. But it seems like months do average out around thirty days, more or less, or at least a few of them.

[dracothelizard]

Well, you're not wrong: http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Discworld_calendar

"A Discworld celestial year has 800 days and because of some interesting astronomical facts two of each seasons (two summers, two winters, etc.). This leads to the fact that many people actually do not count the astronomical years, but the half-years with 400 days, often refered to as "common years". The half-year has 13 months, listed below. Each month except Ick has 32 days, Ick has 16 days. Each week has eight days. The eighth day of each week is called Octeday."

[captlebubbles]

So... physically they are older, then? But as Wolfy pointed out, there's the whole narrative causality thing that effects their aging. That makes sense.