None of you existed before I was born, so you might as well start your calendar there. imho
Thanks for the clarification, but that’s really irrelevant to the point. The intent was to have a calendar based on the year of the birth of Jesus. Even if the year was wrong, the intent was to have it line up with Jesus’ birth.
Thanks for that too, but this is off subject, I don’t believe we are talking about if a deity inspired the current calendar based on the birth of it’s offspring.
So… when we turned over the calendar, it’s like we were turning over a new leaf? Ba dum-kssh!
Good reference, though it doesn’t address your claim. It does point to this article, which says:
It goes on to say that day-month order increased gradually since the early 1980s.
Strunk and White cautions against writing “December 31” as “December 31st.” However, the latter is how most people seem to say it. Their caution might be a bit pedantic, as Chief Pedant would probably argue, and I wouldn’t object.
Why do we have to have two sets of years (one running forward and one running backward) anyway?
What we ought to do is define a year zero and have a single calendar where the years are named with positive and negative numbers. The year 2000 and the year -2000 would be 4000 years apart. Perfect.
‘6 September 2013’ is kind of backwards anyway from a significant digit point of view.
Should be ‘2013 September 6’.
You mean he wasn’t anointed when he was 4 to 6 years old?
For an alternative, I might be inclined to use the French Revolutionary Calendar, but it’s pretty clearly named and organized to fit France’s climate, not other latitudes.
Of course it adresses the claim. It shows that only in the U.S. (and Belize) do they use ‘december 5 2013’. The rest of the world uses ‘5 december 2013’.
Even your military uses day-month notation.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:45, topic:668055”]
Why do we have to have two sets of years (one running forward and one running backward) anyway?
What we ought to do is define a year zero and have a single calendar where the years are named with positive and negative numbers. The year 2000 and the year -2000 would be 4000 years apart. Perfect.
[/QUOTE]
From ISO 8601:
ISO 8601 prescribes, as a minimum, a four-digit year [YYYY] to avoid the year 2000 problem. It therefore represents years from 0000 to 9999, year 0000 being equal to 1 BC and all others AD.
To represent years before 0000 or after 9999, the standard also permits the expansion of the year representation but only by prior agreement between the sender and the receiver.
An expanded year representation [±YYYYY] must have an agreed-upon number of extra year digits beyond the four-digit minimum, and it must be prefixed with a + or − sign instead of the common AD or BC notation; by convention 1 BC is labelled +0000, 2 BC is labeled -0001, and so on.
(This has my vote for avoiding the whole BC/AD vs BCE/CE issue and also takes care of when the Millennium starts. Bonus!)
This is going around Tumblr this week, on a small scale (282 notes is not much).
For what it’s worth, I am a Roman historian. I’ve taken a quick look through the last dozen or so books I read and all of them use BC/AD. I struggle to remember the last time I have seen CE in print.
Not me. Calling the first year “0” rather than “1” seems nonsentical to me.
(FTR regarding the OP : there’s no equivalent to CE/BCE in French, only “After JC” and “Before JC”. I wonder if there’s one in other languages)
Well, I’d hope you’d at least see AUC as well? Or Xth year of Emperor Y.
Consular years come up an awful lot, too. None of the documents I work on are dated ab urbe condita; it’s just a totally different kind of material.
In my own work, as an atheist Jew, I use BC/AD.
And to me, at least until we get around to having a Month Zero and a Day Zero, which we seem to be managing fine without.
I approve of ISO 8601.
There isn’t a “first year.” There’s merely an arbitrary point on the calendar, and we use one numbering system for years before that and one for years after that. Making that point “zero” means that we go to a single numbering system and gets rid of AD, BC, CE, and BCE entirely. It’s just numbers. And numbers have a zero.
Maeglin, would you please look at the thread I just started in GQ, “How Incomplete is Our Knowledge of 1st-Century Rome?”
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:56, topic:668055”]
I approve of ISO 8601.
There isn’t a “first year.” There’s merely an arbitrary point on the calendar, and we use one numbering system for years before that and one for years after that. Making that point “zero” means that we go to a single numbering system and gets rid of AD, BC, CE, and BCE entirely. It’s just numbers. And numbers have a zero.
[/QUOTE]
Is there or isn’t there a Year Zero in the system you are arguing for? And in that case does it matter a hill of beans whether you want to call it “the first year”?
What I’ve never been able to understand is how BCE/CE is supposed to be less Christian-centric. What is more arrogant than taking a Christian dating system and asserting that it is common to everyone?
RE: Maeglin and when you see BCE/CE
It seems most of the college level world history textbooks use it.