In this thread, we got into a variation of the usual century discussion; http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=506987
I had the thought of referencing another case when time is counted without a “time Zero”. When numbering years AD (or CE), there’s no year Zero, so the first year is called year 1. And I realized I can’t think of another case like this. When counting birthdays, or any other unit of time, there’s always a time zero.
Is there any other case I’m not thinking of?
I’m sure some cyclical counting schemes probably have no zero. Can’t think of an example offhand though.
ETA: :smack: month numbers, day-of-the-month numbers.
Pretty well all cases of time-counting start with 1, I think.
Time is a continuum, and when we measure it we do so by breaking it into consecutive chunks, each of which has a definite starting point and end point. The first such chunk is invariably given some variation of the name “period 1”, not “period 0”. It is, after all, the first of a series, so “period 1” is a perfectly logical name. Thus, as already pointed out, Sunday is day 1 of the week, not day 0, and the day after 31/12/2009 will be 1/1/2010, not 0/0/2010. The period between the day a baby is born and his or her first birthday is baby’s first year, not baby’s zeroth [is that even a word?] year. A first birthday is so called because it is the first anniversary of birth, marking the completion of the child’s first year. The first year of the Christian calendar is AD 1, the first year of the Islamic calendar is AH 1, the first year of the Hebrew calender is AM 1, in the Roman calendar Rome was founded in AUC 1. And so forth.
The only exception that leaps to mind is the system that Pol Pot tried to introduce in Cambodia, which started with the year zero. And he was mad.
In these time measuring systems there may, of course, be a point zero – arguabley, midnight between 31 January 1BC and 1 January AD 1 is the “point zero” of the Gregorian calendar – but not a period zero.
even with age I think it applies.
when you’re X months old you’re not 1 year old but you’re in your first year. After you’re first birthday you’re 1 year old but your in your second year of life.
all empires/governments start counting at year 1 (there’s no Showa* year 0 in Japan, for instance, it starts at Showa 1 (end of 1926)
*Hirohito was posthumously given the name Showa, as all emperors posthumously take a new name.
Many computer systems start at 1 instead of 0, though many do the opposite.
From the wikipedia page the concept of 0 as a number and not just a symbol for serperation started in India before the 9th century CE so one would imagine before that all counting started at 1
Pretty much every event starts at 1 - “This is the first meeting of the Midnight Society.” “Welcome to the inaugural Hop On One Foot For Charity Marathon!” “Congratulations to the first champion of I Can’t Think of a Cute Name!” We never had a zeroth meeting or race or fight or whatever.
Even the age of persons is not invariably reckoned as though it started from 0 rather than 1. Some Asian cultures count age in current rather than elapsed years, so a person’s age during the first year of life is 1.
didn’t think about this, but it’s definitely true. Not so much for the Japanese, but the Koreans definitely do it. Or at least, you turn one during the first new years after your birthday, regardless of whether you were born in January or December (meaning a 1 year old could be almost a year old or less than a couple days old). They also use a Lunar calander (traditionally, that is) and I wonder if the two are somehow related
What other people said. What it amounts to is the year number is not really a cardinal, but an ordinal number: this is the 2,009th year of this system.
Basically any calendar (except the aforementioned Mad Pol Pot’s) starts with 1. To those previously mentioned, I would add the French revolutionary calendar (l’an I) and regnal calendars (1952 was 1 Elizabeth II; 1989 was Heisei 1).
Perhaps it’s relevant that the concept of zero wasn’t invented until relatively recently.
Though, of course, one could adopt a naming convention for ordinal positions in which they counted up from 0 instead of from 1. For the historical reasons given by Quartz, this generally hasn’t happened in ordinary language, but that’s just a fact about human nature, not the nature of ordinal positions themselves.
Any calendar which gets as far as year 10 is the product of a culture which has grasped the concept of zero. The Islamic calendar, for instance, was produced by a culture which was familiar with zero, but it still starts with the year 1.
The concept of ten came along far before the concept of zero… the particular writing system which expresses ten as “1 0” came later, but, what of it? Conventions for how to name ordinal positions had already crystallized by then.
I disagree. Zero is conceptually different from the other cardinals; it indicates the absence of value, rather than the presence of any specific value. It makes no sense to speak of the zeroth member of an order; even if the order was reduced to a single item, it would be one item, not zero items. If, to a single item, we add another, we now have an order of two items, the first and the second. It would be irrational to call the additional item the first if there was an item before it.
Sure, the Romans had ‘X’. I am speaking of a culture which has a base system for its numbers, as the Arabs did.
Your reasoning is fixated on naming an ordinal position by the cardinality of the positions prior to and including it.
But why not just name an ordinal position by the cardinality of the positions prior to it? It’s a perfectly cromulent alternative. The zeroth position would be the one with zero many things previous to it, the oneth position would be the one with one thing previous to it, the twoth position would be the one with two things previous to it, and so on.
Mathematicians and programmers get along just fine with such indexing all the time, and it’s even quite advantageous in many contexts. I’m not saying ordinary language should have developed in the same footsteps, but it would have been just as conceptually “permissible” for it to do so.
Presumably, Arab terminology and conventions for naming ordinal positions had been originally developed long, long before they were introduced to the Indian base system for writing down numbers.
Another type of time: music - 1,2,3,4. There is no zeroth beat.
I am having a hard time understanding the premise of the OP, and some of the posts talking about counting from zero. We start counting *everything *at 1, except for some eccentric computer scientists. If you’re at zero, you haven’t actually started counting anything yet, you have just noted that there’s nothing there to count. Yes, I can have zero apples as a result of counting how many apples I have, but if I have any apples at all I do not count “zero, one, two, three…” There is no “apple 0.”
In computer science, we started out by having a chunk of binary data called a word. For the sake of discussion let’s say a word is the same as a byte, or 8 bits. Using a byte, you can use it as an address to refer to memory locations. We could refer to memory locations 1-255, but if we decide to use 0 as a location we can have 256 instead of 255 locations. This leads to the eccentricity of identifying the zeroeth location. But there is a practical reason for it and I have seen it in no other usage (a post above mentions math also but I couldn’t give you an example).
Unfortunately this eccentricity is sometimes extended into other usage. I have seen at least one computer science book that starts with Chapter 0. :rolleyes:
ETA: On review of the OP, I see the question is specifically about time. Time zero is a point in time, same as any other time. When NASA times a mission they start with negative (T -1:00), cross zero, then go into positive (T 1:00). Zero is just a point on the timeline. There is not a “year 0” but there is a virtual point zero, which is 24:00 12/31/1 BC 24:00 (which is the same as 00:00 1/1/1 AD), which is the single point in time dividing the BC from the AD, just as T 00:00 divides the NASA mission from before launch and after launch. But even in the NASA case there is no “hour 0” or “second 0”. Zero is a point with no duration.
I’ve never understood why people find it weird that there wasn’t a Year 0.
It seems totally intuitive to me that the first year in the calendar should be year 1. It’s the first year. Otherwise you’d have to mentally figure, “Oh yeah, 2009, that’s the 2010th year in the calendar”, which is just silly.
When you’re counting how many doughnuts to have, do you start with zero? “I’m only going to have two doughnuts… zero… one… two…” (OK, bad example - of course you would!)
Here’s why. On the number line, there’s +1, -1, and in between them is 0. There is a 1 AD, a 1 BC, but no 0.
But numbers on a number line aren’t like years! Each number on a line is a point, an integer, with gaps between them. But years, for the purpose of a calendar, are countable objects. This is the first year, that is the seventy-fifth year, and so on.
Do the Year 0 fans consider December to be the 11th month of the year, with January as the zeroth? 
It’s just ridiculous.