Hey-oh, worldbuilding time!
So I was pondering a bit on how my elf people would go about developing time-keeping methods - or, more accurately, what sort of temporal measures they would develop.
The first and most important thing to keep in mind is the lack of a "day" in the sense that we have one. The world is a moon orbiting a gas giant, and as such is tidally locked. The planet itself is similar in orbit to the Earth (I use 400 "days") and the moon orbits the planet around once every 4 "days". This means that from sunset to sunset on the moon is approximately one hundred hours. Clearly this is not going to define the sleep/wake cycle of pretty much anything - especially once you take into account the typical ambient light levels. But let's not tangent.
Anyway, I shall be foregoing specifying that the numbers are approximate in order to make writing less obnoxious.
The 100-hour cycle would be neatly divided into quarters by four distinct events:
- sunrise
- solar eclipse
- sunset
- fully reflecting planet
Those would probably each get their own name, like how we have morning and afternoon. I imagine they'd be roughly equivalent to before-eclipse, after-eclipse, waxing, and waning.
That gives them four "days" in a single cycle; similar to our week, I suppose. Closer conceptually/temporally to the Chinese week of five days.
The question of what would then be the "hour" is much more difficult. Early on, at least, one can divide up the day further with divisions such as "a hand above the horizon" and whatnot. The night would be more difficult, requiring references to the shape of the lit planet in the sky above.
I'm thinking at some point they just divide it up into arbitrary numbers. Since they love the number 4 so much, I'm guessing it would be divisions of 16. Their "hour" would therefore be about one and a half of ours. Then... each hour would be divided into... hmmm. Quarters. And each quarter-hour would be 16 "minutes".
I have no idea how you'd say this, though. day-quarter:hour:hour-quarter:minute. So it'd be like, instead of "Monday, 13:26", you'd get... after-eclipse, 2:2:15 or something. Hmm, spoken we'd say "around half past one on Monday", so the equivalent would be like "around three-quarter past two, after-eclipse". Or more likely "around a quarter to three, after-eclipse".
That actually works! HUZZAH!