It kinda is, though. Here is the homepage of a Japanese newspaper–published in Japan, in Japanese. And, if you search carefully, it’s got the date “2013年9月10日”. Here’s a site from the People’s Republic of China–same thing (even the same ideograms–“2013年9月10日”–due to the way the Chinese and–partially–Japanese writing systems work). And here’s a Hebrew-language newspaper, published in Israel–stuck in the middle of all the Hebrew that I can’t read, I see “9.9.2013”.
And here’s one in Arabic, from the United Arab Emirates–in Arabic–but up at the top is says “2013/09/10”. (I would guess that it’s also got the date in the “year of the Hegira” system on there somewhere, but the point is, “September 9, 2013” or “10 September 2013” or “2013/09/10” is now a common reference point for dating systems on this planet.)
Yes, there’s a year zero.
It does. For two reasons:
(1) It’s not the “first” year in any real sense. It’s rather an arbitrary point in the beginning of a continuum. Time goes back some indeterminate number of years into the past, and some indeterminate years into the future. Any zero point is indeterminate.
(2) Picking some year and calling it the “first” year presents an argument for calling it “year one.” Linguistically, one=first, two=second, three=third, and so forth. I believe the arbitrary zero point is just that: the zero point. Not the “first year” or “year one.”
I use CE and BCE to figure out which Christians are the terrible ones who think that’s an attack on their religion
Hmmm…back when I was in school it seemed mostly confined to biology texts, but times could be changing I guess. Grabbing two recentish surveys that are on my to read pile - Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World by John Haldane ( 1999 ) uses BC/AD, but Sasanian Persia, The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Touraj Daryee ( 2009 ) uses BCE/CE.
I’d be wary of calling anything Year Zero.
[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]
How is that any different from what we have, except for your inexplicable insertion of a Year Zero? (When you draw a number line, is 0 a range instead of a point?)
Ah, I see your problem.
[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]
BCE and CE are - and + years, already, counting from a zero point.
You’re missing something. +1 isn’t a “range” either.
On a proper number line, you count … -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 …
If our years counted with such a system, we’d not only eliminate the unnecessary division into two separate systems (BC/BCE and AD/CE), but the math would work right. In our current system, the year 1 AD happened immediately after 1 BC, so 1 AD minus 1 BC equals one year. In a proper system, there’d be a year 0 in between, so +1 minus -1 would be two years, as mathematical logic dictates.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:69, topic:668055”]
You’re missing something. +1 isn’t a “range” either.
On a proper number line, you count … -2, -1, 0, +1, +2 …
[/quote]
Yes, a proper number line, counting off the integer points. But the years are not points; they are spans of time, with end-points marking them off from adjacent years.
1 CE is not the +1 point, it is the span of time between the 0 point and the +1 point. What interval on the number line corresponds to your Year Zero?
If I tell you the temperature was 3 degrees below zero yesterday but is now 5 degrees, you know it’s warmed by 8 degrees.
But BC/AD years don’t work that way. From July 4th, 3 BC to July 4th, 5 AD is seven years. (I’ll stipulate this is only a very minor annoyance rather than a “big deal.”)
BTW, C programming has the opposite problem: TWO zeros, where one might be preferred:
printf("%d %d %d %d %d %d
",
(int)-2.5, (int)-1.5, (int)-0.5,
(int) 0.5, (int) 1.5, (int) 2.5);outputs-2 -1 0 0 1 2
(I find this annoying enough that I don’t even let the compiler convert my negative numbers to integers. 
)
It occupies the entire year between -1 and +1, thus fixing all of the math problems that I’ve pointed out, and that septimus just pointed out.
Well, when a baby is born, the period between the date of birth and the first birthday tends to be measured in hours, days, weeks, and months with no year reckoned until the first birthday has been attained. That is an effective year 0 and it works quite well for calculating ages of persons. (Of course, people do not negatively age outside science fiction, so we have no need to calculate human ages prior to the birth date and never require negative numbers for such calculations.)
Now, I understand that, based on a similar reckoning, with the calendar focused on the event of a particular date, you have identified one possible problem, because reckoning backward from that event/date would also require a year -0, which would really screw up every date calculation so far attempted.
However, since the reckoning of years on a continuum with a specific year as the midpoint is intended to make it easier to calculate “Years Ago” regardless of the launch date, then using a year zero makes quite a bit of sense, as years in such reckonings are, indeed, treated as points on a number line.
That is not a Year Zero. That is moving through the person’s first year, along the interval between the 0 point and the +1 point. When (in Western, not universal, convention) we say a child is “one year old,” we really mean she is past the +1 point.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:72, topic:668055”]
It occupies the entire year between -1 and +1, thus fixing all of the math problems that I’ve pointed out, and that septimus just pointed out.
[/QUOTE]
The interval between -1 and +1 on a number line is two. In terms of years, this is (for example) the interval between the first moment of the first day of 1 BCE, and the last moment of the last day of 1 CE. A two-year span of time with no Year Zero.
I disposed of this in my recent post by specifying the dates July 4. When measuring the distance between two BC years you use same date, e.g. first of year to first of year. Same with two AD years. Your deliberate “kluge” treating AD and BC years differently to avoid Year Zero has no merit. There may be good reasons to reject having Year Zero, but the arithmetic will not work like an ordinary number line.
Measuring the span of time between two specific dates is not measuring between the years in which those dates occur.
Years are intervals, not points in time.
Look, I’m not the one who introduced the analogy of the number line, but I am the one who has used it correctly. If Gary would like to withdraw it and take a different tack, that’s fine. But he can’t treat whole years as discrete points.
Sure he can. What stops him? That you are fixated on the duration of a year is not his problem. Between 0 and 1 there are numerous fractional points, yet we still use number lines to calculate various things.
(And your claim that a baby’s first year in not “zero” relies on usage in English, not on facts. Now you are going to further confuse the issue with muddled semantics. 
)
Of course he can do what he likes, but he can’t expect to be very convincing with a muddled analogy.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying about the baby age. In Western convention we count completed years for human lives but refer to years-in-progress for the calendar, but neither of them involves a year designated Zero. The baby’s first year is the baby’s first year. People talking about the span of time call it the “first year,” as you did.