Year zero

I’m with Hobsbawm. The 21st century started January 1st, 1992. The Gregorian calendar is just an arbitrary construct.

On a slighly different tack (but in the same spirit), isn’t the use of CE and BCE rather than AD and BC a bit pointless? It doesn’t change the fact that the reference point is based on the birth of someone a large group of people think of as the son of God, and, since it’s mentally jarring every time one reads it, it comes across, perhaps unintentionally, as an affectation or squeamishness about religion.

In any case, to be consistent, one should change the names of the days of the week because they impicitly validate belief in Norse (or Babylonian) gods – not even Napoleon managed to get that one to stick (unless you’re Greek or Portuguese).

This was given a goodish going over at the time. There was plenty of evidence shown that previous centuries were believed by contemporaries to have started in 1701, 1801, 1901, but a the majority opinion this time around seems to have been to settle for 2000 on the grounds that a. the tabloid press had already decreed it so, and b. that in these enlightened times mere mathematical precision is boring and pedantic.

‘a good idea is not the same as a rational interpretation of our current calender’

Hmm, which is better, a good idea, or ‘rational interpretation of our current calendar’? Think I’ll take what’s behind door number one, Bob!

(Snark aside, my point is that we don’t have to be constrained by our tools, particularly not when all we’re talking about here is a naming convention.)

‘in these enlightened times mere mathematical precision is boring and pedantic’

I’ll take clear communication over mathematical precision for its own sake any day. I suppose it would matter if our starting point was a truly precise and significant event, eg ‘the day our people invented burritos and thus made humanity smile for the first and best time’, but as the zero point for our calendar is predicated on the story of a guy born of a virgin and able to walk on water, I can’t find myself caring so much about precision.

The 21st century started January 1st, 1992. The Gregorian calendar is just an arbitrary construct.

What about the Julian calendar? New Year’s Day round my house is April 10.

I’ll agree with fergal; when someone starts tossing around CEs, you’re flagged with the thought that the writer is making a point of being secular (or at least non-Christan). It’s usually secular academics that use CE.

There are some fights that don’t seem to be winnable. For instance, my English major wife makes sure to say “It’s I” or It’s he” rather than “It’s me” or “It’s him.” That’s proper grammar, but the point is lost on the vast majority.

The same goes for centuries and millennia starting in XXX0 rather than XXX1; the former is correct, but you look pedantic pushing the point.

Oops, that should be the latter is correct.

My modest proposal. Rename the year 1BCE to 0. Rename all the other BCE years on the formula n BCE -> -(n-1). Then we will have mapped the CE years into the rational integers, which is a much more reasonable system, and these silly questions will go away forever. Of course the ancient historians will be miffed, but how much weight can they swing? Greatest good for greatest number.

Aeon

Fair play on asking people not to overuse the term ‘pedant’, of which i’m certainly guilty. The problem, though, is that these language discussions are always full of people who point to one fact and say ‘I’ve got a fact and this makes me right’, without realising or ackowledging that questions of language usage are usually too complex to hinge on one single fact, even if, as in this case, it’s the incontrovertible one that there are 1,000 years in a millenium.

Why don’t we just accept Heribert Illig’s discovery that somewhere in the second half of the first millennium 297 fictitious years were inserted, and that we are really living in 1707 now? That way the solution to this problem can be postponed for another 10 generations.

If we’re going by common usage rather than mathematical precision, then really the number of a year can’t tell us what millennium it belongs to. I can’t think of any meaningful social/historical phenomena that changed over precisely on January 1 of 2000 or of 2004. Remember that “the sixties” began somewhere in the middle of the set of years beginning with 196-, far after January 1 1961 or January 1 1960.

I vote that the 21st century as a useful historical epoch began (at least in America) either on January 25 2001 (Bush’s inauguration) or September 11 2001.

Reuben, you’re right that it’s partly about language, but words like “century” and “millenium” are pretty well defined – indeed, even the “21st century starts in 2000” crowd uses the words _exactly_ as I do. Ask one of them what “century” means, and they’ll say “period of 100 years” just as “dozen” means “collection of 12 things.” It’s not as though there is some disagreement about what “century” means. We and they agree it means “period of 100 years,” and that’s why this works as we say, not as they say – the first was 1-100, so the second was 101-200, etc., hence the 20th must be 1901-2000. Your point would have greater validity if we were talking about vaguely-defined or fungible terms, but we’re not. “Century” and “millenium” are like “dozen,” not like “thin.”

If the argument is framed as “pedantry” against “common sense” there can be so surprise at the majority view. Suppose we were to reframe the conflict as “those who can count to 100” against “innumerates.”

John Q wrote:
if this implies I need to refer to the year before 1 CE as 0 CE, I’ll do so, should the occasion ever arise.

It’s not that simple, unfortunately; I think your proposal requires that you subtract 1 from every BC[E] date. This would cause a lot o’confusion whenever you were talking about ancient history.

Aeon, sure, a century is a period of a hundred years, but that doesn’t settle when it starts. I can say that it was a century ago that, um, whatever the hell happened in 1904. Admittedly the way I number the centuries runs into a tiny rough spot if you want to talk about the years 1-100, but that rough spot is a small price to pay for the way referring to 2000 as the beginning of the 20th century facilitates communication with our fellow-creatures.

I was the one who brought this issue up here, BTW, and I don’t think any of the arguments on the thread have equalled my “fresh can of whoop-ass” argument. (What’s that I hear? Sounded kinda like a can being opened.)

Aeon

You’ve missed my point. The argument isn’t over how long a millenium is, it’s over when we want to declare that this millenium starts. That’s a different proposition altogether.

And if pretty much everyone agrees that this millenium started in 2000, and to some people that means that this must mean that some century over the last 1000 or 2000 years has had a year stolen from it, well, frankly, who cares? It’s not as if that year actually disappeared (though if one could, I’d like to nominate 1977, when I was really fat and someone stole my Huffy).

All that’s happened is that part of the definition of ‘millenium’ has changed. That is, the definition of how long one is hasn’t altered, but our collective definition of when ‘the millenium’ starts has shifted by one.

Or, to look at it a slightly different way, you say that the definition of ‘a millenium’ is pretty well-defined. And it is. But we’re not talking about ‘a millenium’, we’re talking about ‘the millenium’. Changing the article brings notions of beginnings of endings into the the definition.

So if an earlier poster is correct in saying that the last millenium was considered to begin in 1001, then that means that 1,000 or so years ago, their definition of ‘the millenium’ included the concept ‘beginning in a year that ends in 001’. But now, the common defintion of ‘the millenium’ appears to include the concept ‘year that ends in 000’, even though the definition of ‘a millenium’ hasn’t changed.

Cheers

Reuben, when you say “But now, the common defintion of ‘the millenium’ appears to include the concept ‘year that ends in 000’, even though the definition of ‘a millenium’ hasn’t changed.” — doesn’t that just mean that lots of people, encouraged by a sensationalist media, are making a mistake about how to count? It’s certainly possible that large numbers of people can make the same mistake.

Matt, you write “sure, a century is a period of a hundred years, but that doesn’t settle when it starts,” which is true when we use indefinite articles as in “it happened a century ago.” But when we’re using the definite article with a modifier (the 1st century, the 20th century), then the descriptors must have some referent. “1st” of what? “20th” since what? These cases refer to our dating system (regardless of whether the events presupposed to have happened actually did or not): 1st century AD, which must =1-100. The 20th of these things would thus include 2000. Obviously you know that, and you know that there’s zeroth apple on the table, so I take your main point to be that language means whatever people want it to mean and so on. But if language means _anything_, then it’s possible for someone to make a mistake, and it’s therefore possible for _lots_ of people to make a mistake. The fact that languages evolve over time doesn’t mean that _any_ instance of lots-of-people-making-a-mistake-about-something is a-ok.

My daughter was born at dawn on 01-01-01, so that is when the C21st began – she wholeheartedly rejects the barbarity of the C20th and waited just long enough to avoid being associated with it.

To Europeans, the 21st century is much better than the barbaric 20th. A lot of Americans, however, are looking back at the 20th with nostalgia.

Unfortunately, you’re all wrong about the meaning of “millenium”: the correct definition is “misspelling of ‘millennium'”. By the way, if a millennium is a period of 1000 years, from Latin ‘mille’ (1000) and ‘anni’ (years), then a millenium should be a group of 1000 ‘ani’, that is anuses.

So the key question here is what is the connection between the first bottled can of whoop ass and 1,000 Latin anuses?

Stentor – that’s precisely the point that Hobsbawm is making when he claims January 1, 1992, as the start of the 21st century. In that view, the 20th century started on July 28, 1914, and encompassed the two world wars and the struggle between capitalism and communism; once the Soviet Union was legitimately dead, we were in a distinctly different historical era.

To the extent that the “war on terror” is the defining issue of our time, though, it is unclear whether the decade between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror is better treaded as a coda to the former or a prelud to the latter.

If Europeans had no concept of zero in 1200, how did they write “1200”?

MCC, obviously. Not much of a New Roman, are you?

They still use Roman Numerals. If you mean to do arithmetic with, there were still some people using them for that in the 16th century. Just like people who insist on a century starting in an 00 year, they refused to give up their old ways for better ones.

Calendar years are a bit like miles and birthdays. 2000 is the natural turning point, like reaching 20,000 miles on the odometer or turning 20 years old would be (and said rollover points indicate the completion, not the beginning, of mile 20,000/one’s 20th year). In 2000, if we were not in the new millennium, then we must have been in the last decade of the last century of the previous millennium. Yet as everyone knows, the 1990s ended January 1st, 2000.

That shouldn’t have stopped anyone, however, from celebrating the Eve before 2001 like it was 1999.

“… turning 20 years old would be…”

Really, who celebrates 20? It’s 21 that matters (unless you’re in a land where 18 is the age that matters). Thus I say the issue is settled: it must be that the new era is the year ending in a one! Pedantry is thus ended: each person has their own year 21, with the zeroth year being only nine months long, and dating becomes a personal issue =). Now that’s an idea, ~seven billion dating systems and more coming every year.

This is a ridiculous argument. Common sense once told everyone the world was flat. But it isn’t. People (mainly media marketing people, decided to mark the year that started with a nice round number, 2000, as the start of a millennium or “the millennium” — and distinguishing between the two terms on the basis of whether a definite or indefinite article is used betrays a pedantry far more ludicrous than that of which those who can count are accused. As a sub-editor I am often accused of pedantry, but where would academics be if the newspapers sacrificed numerical accuracy about, ooh, say, body counts, voting figures (think Bush/Gore, etc, in favour of feel-good expediency and lots of ad money. Real newspapers, anyway.

That 2+2=4 is not a pedantic assertion. It is just true.

The dismal performance of British school pupils in the “boring” subject of mathematics has been amply demonstrated by numerous learned fools on this thread.

“In any case, this isn’t about when the Arabic “zero” entered European mathematics, it’s about the difference between numbers used arithmetically and numbers used to count. Count the apples – 1,2,3 -the first one, the second one, etc. There’s no zeroth apple.”

Try that when referencing array elements in a C program and you’ll reference past the end of the array! The crackers will love you for it, however.

Aeon has hit it right on the head, and I think Reuben and several others are missing the most fundamental mathematical point.

Calendars are a system of ordinal numbers. That is: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Zero doesn’t exist in ordinal counting. The year 2000 is called 2000 because its the 2000th year since a specified reference point. Every calendar ever created works this way. Whether it’s counting the twelfth year of the reign of Ragnar the Terrible or the Year of Our Lord 2000, it’s still ordinal counting, so you can’t have a year zero even if you really, really, really want one. Its simply the nature of how calendars work.

No amount of convention, preference, attitude or even agreement can alter the purely mathematical fact that there is no such thing as zero in an ordinal number system.

You can no more refer to a “zeroeth” year than you can sensibly answer the questions who was the “zeroeth” President or which was the “zeroeth” State admitted to the Union?