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A search on "ethiopic calendar" (using quotation marks around the term) directed us to a web site called Calendars Throught the Ages, where we quickly found the answer. According to the site, Ethiopians are, indeed, living in 1992. ( Look out, this suggests that grunge is just now hitting the Ethiopian airwaves.) The Ethiopian (and Coptic) calendar has 13 months, 12 with 30 days each, and an intercalary month at the end of the year with five or six days, depending whether the year is a leap year or not. The year starts on September 11th (of the Gregorian calendar)
or on the 12th (in Gregorian leap years). The Ethiopic leap year apparently follows the Gregorian leap year -- 2000 will see an extra day in both calendars. This ostensibly answers your question, but we couldn't just leave it at that. We wanted to know why, so we searched on "calendars," which led us to Yahoo!'s Reference > Calendar category. After scanning the listed sites, we chose the Calendar Information Page, which provides simple, extremely useful information on any kind of calendar. We scrolled down to the African Calendars section and clicked on Ethiopia Calendar Info. We were delighted to find ourselves on
a sub-page of the always-reliable Library of Congress web site. Scrolling down, we learned that the discrepancy in calendars results from a difference of opinion between the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church on the date of the creation of the world.
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