Cecil answered the question everyone’s been asking about whether 2000
or 2001 is the new millenium. However, he provided no proof for his answer
that the first calendar year was numbered 1 and thus 2001 is the new millenium. Personally, I believe the first
year was zero, but I have no evidence of this, so I would like to know if anyone
has any evidence of the first year being either 1 or zero. My logic is that human age starts at zero, not 1, so why would the calendar start at 1? I, of course,
am a computer programmer and thus am partial to zero based counting. Additionally, our ancestors surely lost track of the date and probably lost a few years here and there during the early first millenium so the real year is probably 1930, or maybe it’s 2050, so I think it’s pointless to say the
year started at 1, and we should just say it started at zero since it’s a
better starting point. I think everyone who thinks 2001 is the new millenium
is a geek, a smarty pants, and is also wrong, and so far no one I’ve met can
beat my argument. Can you?
Your first of life is also Year 1. I understand in some cultures it’s Year 2, because they measure approximately from conception. Nobody would say you have to live 12 months before your get into Year 1. Same thing with the calendar, I suppose, but it’s a matter of how many years in a millennium, not what the first year was called. The complaint is that completing 999 years doesn’t complete a millennium. I agree, though, that with all the fooling around changing how the calendar runs overwhelms only 1 yr anyhow. (Plus not being into Christianity, I wouldn’t care they started the first millenium a year or two before JC dropped.)
Ray
*sigh
McBunes: Cecil answered the question everyone’s been asking about whether 2000 or 2001 is the new millenium. However, he provided no proof for his answer that the first calendar year was numbered 1 and thus 2001 is the new millenium.*
You just stated the proof, believe it or not. Year numbers are shorthand for saying “The N[sup]th[/sup] Year, AD”. So, the 1st year AD was 1 AD.
Personally, I believe the first
year was zero, but I have no evidence of this, so I would like to know if anyone has any evidence of the first year being either 1 or zero.
Actually, the first year AD was called 700-something by the Romans. This was counting the years since the city of Rome was built. The Jews and the Chinese had their own counts.
The AD count wasn’t developed until a few centuries after Jesus’ time on Earth.
The first of anything is numbered 1. Count your fingers. Did you go 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 (then scream when you figured out that you were missing one)? No, you started with 1. This is also shorthand for saying “first finger, second finger,…, tenth finger”.
Counting uses the Natural numbers only, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, … Adding zero to this set produces the set of Whole numbers, which is not used for counting
*My logic is that human age starts at zero, not 1, so why would the calendar start at 1? *
Because age is a cardinal measurement of your time ex utero. More accurately, we could state our age to decimals of accuracy (35.18579), but that would make us sound geeky. (Only pre-10-year-olds and 15 year olds awaiting their drivers permits keep track of their fractional age.) So we truncate to the year.
I, of course, am a computer programmer and thus am partial to zero based counting.
“Of course” you’re a computer programmer? Just because you’re on the Internet? I’m one too, and I prefer counting based (starting) on 1. Is your preference to 0 because the computer language C starts its indexes with 0? That’s just to terse up the compiled code.
If we were cops and I asked you to count the number of criminals you see waiting to ambush us in an alley, I hope you’d start counting at 1.
Additionally, our ancestors surely lost track of the date and probably lost a few years here and there during the early first millenium so the real year is probably 1930, or maybe it’s 2050…
Actually, the monk who devised the AD system was off by about 4 years (some say up to 8). But we’re not exactly sure when Jesus was born, some base was needed, so what the monk came up with is used.
*So I think it’s pointless to say the
year started at 1, and we should just say it started at zero since it’s a better starting point. *
Why is zero better than one? Just so that it’ll satisfy people who can’t count and are overwhelmed by the “2” in the year? Why not start it with -5 or 234?
*I think everyone who thinks 2001 is the new millenium is a geek, a smarty pants, and is also wrong, and so far no one I’ve met can beat my argument. Can you?
I think I have beaten your argument, as evidenced in several topics posted on SDMB, including this one.
I may be a geek and a smarty-pants, but I’m not wrong. Plus, I can spell “millennium” correctly.
I looked in the mirror today/My eyes just didn’t seem so bright
I’ve lost a few more hairs/I think I’m going bald - Rush
But I can’t seem to turn off my HTML Italics. 
To others reading, the last two paragraphs are mine, not McBunes’.
I looked in the mirror today/My eyes just didn’t seem so bright
I’ve lost a few more hairs/I think I’m going bald - Rush
I think enough has been said about the damned millennium already, but I received this quote as part of the urban legends newsletter and I thought it amusing.
Well, My on-line dictionary shows “millenium” as an acceptable spelling of millennium. Alas, Webster’s online ( http://www.m-w.com ) and old fashioned hard cover do not show the word “millenium”. I guess I have to go with Webster’s on this one.
Oh, and don’t worry about forgetting to turn italics off. It’s important to always make a mistake when pointing out someone else’s misteaks.
Enright3
That’s because you have discoverd an unbeatable argument: the blind assertion of a false proposition on the ground that you “personally … believe” it but “have no evidence of it”, other than the fact that it’s “better”. Follow that up with the real killer, that anyone who disagrees is a “geek”, a “smarty pants” and “wrong”.
How could an argument like that ever be beaten? It’s completely watertight.
Zero would be an absurd starting point for time. That would assume nothing came before. That, in & of itself, is silly, because those who thought of the time would have been on earth for many years beforehand.
Let’s imagine each year is represented by a jar of water. The first year was called the year “1” but was not actually a year yet–the jar of water was not full. So in June of that year, the jar would be half full. When you get up to the year 2000, it is the 2000th jar. So in June of 2000, the 2000th jar will be half full. Thus, the number of jars is one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and a half. We won’t reach 2000 jars and thus 2000 years until January 1, 2001. Does that help, McBunes?
I realize I’m generalizing here, but as in most cases, I don’t care.
-Dave Barry
I had to do quite a bit of research on this “When Does the Millennium Start - 2000 or 2001?” question, for that never-ending series of newspaper articles when there was no news between the holidays.
The B.C. and A.D. “thing” was developed in the 500s by a guy named Dionysius (which translates to “Dennis the Diminutive” - poor guy. Hard to pick up chicks with a moniker like that.) He was commissioned by the Pope to determine the length of the Christian era.
He got it wrong, incidentally. The Bible’s Book of Matthew indicates Christ was born under the reign of King Herod. While birth records for carpenter’s sons weren’t kept, death records for kings were. Herod died in about 4 B.C. So for Christian fundamentalists expecting great wailing and gnashing of teeth on the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ, that happened without fanfare in about 1996.)
Back on point, there most definitely was no year 0. Zero wasn’t a fully recognized numeral at the time. The calendar went 2 B.C., 1 B.C., 1 A.D., 2 A.D. and so on.
That may not solve the 2000 or 2001 debate, however. After being all cocksure about centuries and millenia beginning in the ‘01’ year, I recently heard an argument for 2000 that I can’t really dispute.
Because the Christian era was determined 500-plus years after the fact, and there was no year 0, the argument could be made that only the first century of that time was screwed up, 99 years long. Anyone who thinks that days, months, years and the calendar in general are a very exact science should look into their history a bit. (For example, “The Year of Confusion” - 56 B.C. I think it was - Caesar decreed the year 445 days long, to get his calendar recalibrated with the cycles of the sun and moon. Heck, some countries chopped about two weeks out of their March as late as around 1930 to get on board with our Gregorian calendar.)
Like I would need an excuse to party hard both New Years.
“I am a news-paper man, damn it! Come to the point with me, sir, or take your business elsewhere!” - T. Herman Zweibel, Publisher, The Onion
You’re all totally missing the point of the OP:
The clear evidence is as follows:
If Event A occurred in Year 1, and Event B occurred one year before that, do we say that Event B occurred in Year 0, or in Year 1 BCE ?
Similarly, if Event A occurred in Year 1, and Event B occurred two years before that, do we say that Event B occurred in Year 1 BCE, or in Year 2 BCE ?
The correct answer is the second one, in both cases.
This is not a question that can be debated logically, because both answers are logically correct, each in their own way. The “correct” answer is that it is based on a societal convention.
Ever since historians have been assigning dates prior to Year One, they have been leaving out any consideration for Year Zero. This is a fact of historical record, which we are all powerless to change. Any book about history ever written subscribes to the convention that the following is a correct timeline and is not missing any years:
Year 3 before the Christian era
Year 2 before the Christian era
Year 1 before the Christian era
Year 1 of the Christian era
Year 2 of the Christian era
Year 3 of the Christian era
Anyone who wants to differ from the above convention, and include a Year Zero is free to do so. But when he reads in a book about an event which occurred in 23 BCE, he should mentally translate that as “23 years prior to Year 1, which is only 22 BCE, counting from Year Zero”, so that it will fit his own scheme. Similarly, if he writes a history book, he should either convert all his dates, or be prepared for complaints.
This is similar to asking “What number comes after ‘7’?” The conventionally acceptable answer is “8”. People who like to use a base-eight numbering system are not incorrect if they answer “10”, but they should realize that they are swimming against the tide.
Correction: That should be “all except KeithM”, who posted his answer while I was writing mine.
The status of 0 has absolutely no bearing on the question. Even in cultures (such as ours) which “fully recognize” zero, when we count things (which is what a calendrical reckoning is all about), we start counting at 1. When we write dates in numbers, is the first day of the month “0 July”? Is January month “0”? Of course not?
In one sense, the reckoning of time DOES begin at zero. If we could have set a digital clock at the theoretical start of Christian reckoning, one that displayed the ELAPSED time like this:
YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.fractions of a second
The YYYY figure wouldn’t roll over to 0001 until 1 AD had come to completion: On december 31. We would start at 0000-00-00 00:00:00.000. While all year, by our counting system (calendar), we would be in year 1 AD, we wouldn’t see 0001 on our elapsed time clock till after the end of the year. Similarly, all through the first hour of the day (by counting), a 24-hour clock will show the elapsed time as 00:something. By the time the elapsed time clock shows 01:something, we are already into the SECOND hour.
I recently read an article in which the author stated that this millennium business is all hype for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the Christian reckoning is but one of several systems used in the world, at least by religious folks, even if it is the secular calendar for the entire planet. He went on to give the example of the Jewish calendar, in which year 6000 is 235 years (or whatever, I forget the exact figure) away. In 6000 by that calendar, he wrote, we will enter the 6th Jewish millennium. Wrong on two counts: The rollover is at the end of 6000, not the beginning, and the sixth millennium is already WELL UNDER WAY! It began in 5001, and ends with 6000. 6001 is the first year of the SEVENTH!
The calendar NOW GOES that way; at the time no one really noticed. “Marcus, can you drop into Hallmarkii on your way back from the Forum, and grab a couple new calendars? The milk calendar was missing from the paper. I’ll keep the 1 B.C. calendar from the bathroom as a souvenir, and stash the puppy-a-day one from the kitchen for a couple years before auctioning it on eBay!”
Seeing as how it’s all arbitrary and subject to retroactive revision, here’s how I settle it:
Third millennium: Jan. 1 2000 - Dec. 31 2999
Second millenium: Jan. 1 1000 - Dec. 31 1999
First millennium: Jan. 1 1 B.C. - Dec. 31 999
Why not start the first millennium in 1 B.C.? It’s all arbitrary anyway. Even choosing January 1 as the start of the year is arbitrary.
After all, Jesus was probably born in the summer of 4 B.C. anyway; nobody much used our numbering system until the 11th century anyway (and still is far from universal); and perpetuating the mistakes of a 6th-Century monk, who not only miscalculated Jesus’ birth but also forgot to include a year “0”, seems like a pretty weak reason for missing some great parties.
Read that seriously or sarcastically, as suits your mood…
Oh, fer crissake! This topic is, in my opinion, a primary candidate to be included with the “gry riddle” and “driveway/parkway” as discussions that should be banned and anyone initiating it, labelled “troll”.
This has been argued to death, and anyone that is going to change their mind, already has.
Let it go, people.
Mr. K’s Link of the Month:
labradorian…
You may be correct in a majority of cases, but there are cases of cultures who knew about zero a long time ago, and do use them in numbering dates. From what a Persian friend of mine told me a while ago, the days of the week in Persion are basically like “Day0”, “Day1”, “Day2”… to “Day6” . (Or perhaps it’s like “Day”, “Day1”, “Day2”…) at any rate, it doesn’t start at 1.
Any Persian speakers here can correct me if I am wrong.
So, basically, it is a matter of convention, although to me it seems more logical to start at 0. i mean, 12 midnight is the first hour of each day, not 1 AM. (although is continuing at 12 really better?). When we measure things, the measuring stick starts at 0. Our ages start at 0, not 1. And so, and so on… So you see that not everything has to start at 1.
Re: Labradorian’s statement that the calendar NOW GOES 2 B.C., 1 B.C., 1 A.D., 2 A.D., etc., and people at the time didn’t much know or care.
Of course I understand that the calendar didn’t go that way THEN. It went that way after Dionysius’ work in the 6th Century. And as has been pointed out ad nauseum, it’s all rather arbitrary anyway.
If it makes everyone feel better, you celebrated the start of ‘the 2000s,’ Jan. 1; you can celebrate the start of the new century and millennium Jan. 1, 2001.
Geesh, folks, do y’all love to feed trolls? <eyeroll>
This has been discussed ad nauseum in this forum. The only people who post statements similar to the OP are those who love to poke sticks in ant nests and watch them run around.