In order to be able to fulfil the need to situate cultural products like the documents of this site in time some kind of chronological system is required. On this planet the earthly solar year is best suited as a unit for a more or less natural chronology. Such a chronology must, then, establish two things:

1. the number of the year.
   For want of something better at present this site counts the number of years after (the first solstice succeeding) the end of the Second World War.
2. the number (and name) of the day of the year.
   For this purpose the present site uses the (Quaternary) Metric World Calendar instead of a historically deformed freak of culture such as the Gregorian one.

The following pages, card and diary deal specifically with the new era and the Metric calendar, except for one that is about the old, Christianistic era developed by Exiguus:

• Automatic conversion from Gregorian to Metric
• The Beginning of a New Home and Dating System
• Exiguus' Era
• A perpetual New Year card in:
  • This Language only
  • Zhezhong Yuyan and This Language
  • Deze Taal

TRINPsite offers you:

• in the Book of Symbols
• for every-year personal use
  (free from days specially marked for exclusivists)

All MVVM documents show two dates, separated by a hyphen, after the site name MVVM at the top on the left. The first of these dates is the day on which the document was made public on the Internet, the second the day when the document was last changed, at least as far as the visible text is concerned. The dates are represented by codes consisting of three numbers: 12.34.5. The first number relates to the year, starting from the end of the Second World War; the second and third numbers relate to the week and the day of the week in accordance with the Metric World Calendar.

In languages which are in at least one respect much more logical or consistent than the traditional variant of This Language every month of the year is given a numerical name (Month One or First Month, Month Two or Second Month, and so on), regardless of the calendar used. Such a name may also be used for a month of the Metric World Calendar, but it does not distinguish a Metric month from one of the months of the usually freakish, if not exclusivist, calendars in use at the same place or elsewhere, at the same time or in the past. (Moreover, a name like First Month may be confused with the first month of a series of months not starting with 'First Month', dependent on other characteristics of the language in question.) Therefore, it is very worthwhile to have alternative names for the months which apply to the Metric World Calendar only. Such names have already been created for Zhezhong Yuyan. Since the morphemes Yule and Lent do not exist in that language (or would change the meaning of the morpheme for Spring), they have been replaced by East and West.

As from 62.51.2 the literal translations of the typically Metric names used in Zhezhong Yuyan will also be used in This Language for universal, nondenominational purposes. The names with Yule, Equinoctial and Lent as introduced in the will continue to be used in a neutralistic context and therefore at TRINPsite. The correspondence between the universal and specifically neutralistic names and abbreviations is as follows: