Another ambiguity, though perhaps less important, is that "2000s" could refer to 2000-2999.
Alternatively: the third millennium.
Let's stop counting centuries
71–80 of 449 posts
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#72> Did the American revolution happen before, during, or after the Enlightenment? I’ve no idea. When did the American revolution happen? Not everyone’s cultural frame of reference is the same as yours. I can tell you when the Synod of Whitby happened, though.
The American and French Revolutions are a pretty big deal on the road to modern democracy, as well as being tied to 1700s Enlightenment ideals. Everyone educated should know this.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does that even mean? Do we allow for the distortion due to the shift from the Julian to Gregorian calendars, such that the nth year is 11 days earlier? Of course not, because that would be stupid. Instead, we accept that the start point was arbitrary and reference to our normal counting system rather than getting hung up about the precise number of days since some arbitrary epoch.
> What does that even mean? It means just what it says. In the common calendar, the year after 1 BC (or BCE in the new notation) was 1 AD (or CE in the new notation). There was no "January 1, 0000".
As I said twice, whether that date actually existed or not is irrelevant.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#74Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What does that even mean? It means just what it says. In the common calendar, the year after 1 BC (or BCE in the new notation) was 1 AD (or CE in the new notation). There was no "January 1, 0000".
As I said twice, whether that date actually existed or not is irrelevant.
> whether that date actually existed or not is irrelevant.
No, it isn't, since you explicitly said to start the first century on the date that doesn't exist. What does that even mean?
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the first century began Jan 1, 0000. Whether that year actually existed or not is irrelevant - we shouldn't change our counting system in the years 100, 200 etc.
The calendar goes from 1 BC to 1 AD, there is no year 0.
There is no year zero according to first-order pedants. Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on context.
It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#77It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century! At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought t…
If people start saying “zeroth century”, it’s only going to create confusion, because “first century” will then become ambiguous.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#78A lot of this runaround is happening because people get hung up on the fact that the "AD" era began as AD 1. But that year is not magic--it didn't even correlate with the year of Jesus's birth or death. So let's just start the AD era a year before, and call that year "AD 0". It can even overlap with BC 1. BC 1 is the same as AD 0. Fine, we can handle that, right? Then the 00s are [0, 100), 100s are [100, 200), etc. Z…
This reminds me that centuries such as "the third century BC" are even harder to translate into date ranges. That one's 201 BC to 300 BC, inclusive, backward. Or you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750. [Edit: no it doesn't.] In fact archeologists have adapted to writing "CE" and "BCE" these days, but despite that flexibility I've never seen somebody wr…
> you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750.
From comparing some online answers (see links), I'd conclude that even though the numbers are ordered backward, "first"/"last"/"early"/"late" would more commonly be understood to reference the years' relative position in a timeline. That is, "2000 to about minus 1750" would be the first quarter of the second millennium BC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_century_BC (the "last century BC") https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1akt4zm/this... https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-first-half-of-the-1st-cent... https://www.quora.com/What-is-meant-by-the-2nd-half-of-the-5... etc
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#79Meh, too small of an issue to be bothered about it.
small issues are easy to solve! I think it isn't as sexy/interesting as what I thought the article was going to be about (about a different way of talking about our history, in eras maybe vs centuries or something). this strikes me as kind of like a small PR to our language that makes an incremental improvement to a clearly confusing thing. Should be easy to merge :)
No, not easy. You want to change ao social convention? That is not easy.
Even changing all the places it got encoded into software probably wouldn't be easy.
Re: Let's stop counting centuries
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me that centuries such as "the third century BC" are even harder to translate into date ranges. That one's 201 BC to 300 BC, inclusive, backward. Or you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750. [Edit: no it doesn't.] In fact archeologists have adapted to writing "CE" and "BCE" these days, but despite that flexibility I've never seen somebody wr…
> you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750. From comparing some online answers (see links), I'd conclude that even though the numbers are ordered backward, "first"/"last"/"early"/"late" would more commonly be understood to reference the years' relative position in a timeline. That is, "2000 to about minus 1750" would be the first quarter of the second mi…
Oh you're right, I tripped up. "The last quarter of the second millennium BC" means about minus 1250 to minus 1001.
I often get excited by some discovery sounding a lot older than it actually is, for reasons like this.