Glafarran culture has existed, in some form or other, for many tens or even hundreds of thousands of years by the measure of most any means you care to name, save ones working off of the movements of whole galaxies. And while it is not entirely inaccurate to think of it as a single mode of thought and behaviour across the majority of a large galaxy and portions of some of its nearest sub-galaxy satellites one must remember that it has always been a very vast, far flung, and above all diverse place. Most of what is thought of as Galfarran cultural items grew out of a need for interstellar merchants and governments to meaningfully communicate, thus was born the Galfarran clock and calendar.

The precise origin of the Galfarran clock is partially lost to antiquity, but it is known that it was somehow standardised against some kind of phenomenon found near one of the oldest member worlds. As for which group invented the calendar there have been presented at least several thousand possible origins that are of equal likelihood.

As the Galfarran number system use a base₁₂ count, the most accepted and likely answer for the origin of the clock is either that it was born of the same people and world as devised the trade tongue’s number system, or simply was devised after the Galfarran language had taken strong hold in the old Federation; this detail is wont to cause very heated debate among historians.

The smallest common unit is the piclano (plural plicanid) which has a duration very close to that of the Gregorian second of Earth. While there is a difference, and anything that is trying to measure such times over centuries may find the discrepancy enough to cause loss of accuracy, an assumption of 1:1 translation is generally sufficient. There are sixty piclanid to a single saen (plural saenead), and there are sixy of those to a nulair (plural nulaire). This is the only standardised measure of time found among Galfarran speaking peoples. Few worlds in that galaxy, nor among many that hold any close ties to it use any alternative clocks, though a few worlds do hold onto their own time keeping units for day to day and use Galfarran time only for off-world purposes.

The Galfarran calendar seems to have begun life as an arbitrary calendar exclusively for interstellar use. This is the Galactic Standard Year. It is comprised of 600 days each 30 nulaire long. It was subdivided into 12 korvare (singular korva) of 50 days each. An apparent later addition was the sulid (plural sulida) which was defined as ¼ of a korva, and the convention is to drop the fraction. Thus a Standard sulid is 14 Standard days.

The names of those 12 korvare and the terminology was quickly adopted among various colony worlds and even began to work itself into the cultural consciousness that was emerging among the worlds that had begun to speak Galfarran as much or more than whatever native tongue their forefathers had used. The Standard year itself, though has apparently always been seen as cumbersome and arbitrary to use for anything day to day and no historical evidence of its use outside of interstellar commerce and politics has ever been found. Thus was born loser definitions for the terms.

Korva now means 1/12 of a planet’s orbital period. There are conventions for arranging the days left over when this is done to planets whose orbits do not divide easily by 12, but these conventions are very loose and could be discussed at length in many long volumes of text (and have, in fact been. See The Changing Face of the Korva by Professor Glikreth Li Mothrilli Lothbri a historian at University of Loribrig from 1209 to 1456 Kilirian a 900 volume series on the various means employed to distribute the days of the year), but some common themes do seem to arise. E.g. it is quite common to put the fewest extra days in Dufoĵe.

A day is always the measure of a planet’s rotational period.

The names of the korvare are:
Unua
Dufoĵe
Ĵaudo
Kvara
Kvina
Dekdua
Okona
Makkako
Gadmeso
Mirtello
Vendredo
Feino

These names are always in this order. The common convention for starting the year is, for colonies, to start it with the landing of the founders. For older worlds it’s typically the start of the old calendar that was replaced.