I wish I had though to ask my Latin teacher this years ago. My English teacher taught us that the A.D. comes before the year because A.D. means Anno Domini or “In the year of the Lord.” “Two Thousand in the year of the Lord” doesn’t make any sense, ergo it should be A.D. 2000. But to me, “In the year of the Lord two thousand” doesn’t make much more sense. The only thing that really makes sense is “in the two-thousandth year of the Lord,” in which the number is ordinal and comes in the middle of the translation of A.D.
The first use of A.D. in Latin was by Dionysius Exiguus, but I can’t find any Latin texts that use it. The first use of A.D. in [Old] English was in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. In the OE texts of that work that I’ve found, A.D. comes before the year, just as my English teacher taught me. I thought I could find a parallel with A.U.C., but most references say it stands for “ab urbe condita,” not (as I was taught) “Anno urbis conditae.” I have found in De Aquisanno ab urbe condita quandringentesimo octogesimo uno which I think is “in the year from the founding of the city the four hundred, eighty-first,” which would tend to support my ordinal-number theory. (Latin numbers were never my strong suit, I must admit; I’m not even sure the uno belongs to the date).
My questions:[ul]In Latin, did A.D. come before or after the number?
When the number that goes with A.D. was written out as a word, was it ordinal or cardinal?[/ul]
The Romans did things both ways, depending on the mood of the stone carver.
The numbering was also not uniform. The “Roman numerals” you learn in school to read old clocks and copyright dates was actually subject to variation.
Four could be IIII or IV.
Three was sometimes IIV.
Some other letters were used than IVLCDM, especially on the sites of former Greek colonies. The Greeks had various alphabetical systems of numbers, and they varied by city-state.
Romans did care little about word order, but I suspect as now word order could be used to change the tone of a discussion, even if it was codified by the grammarians.
On some important buildings, famous laws and such were restated in random order, unlike copying Moses’ tablets.
One thing that appealed to me was that they had nice serif-rich Roman fonts for monospaced applications, such as victory obelisks.
Yet, oddly, when typing into a monospaced screen box like I am now, you have only awful Elite fonts to choose from.
[hijack](These were invented by IBM to keep the a’s and e’s on their typewriters from being clogged by cloth ribbon lint that plagued Remington’s Pica font. A good sales idea then, appealing to busy offices, but a curse on the world since. Don’t get me started. If you want to talk about anything in this aside- please move to a new thread so the Romans can have one of their own.)
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[hijack again, sorry]
Of course I meant Prestige instead of Elite. Remmington also had Elite. They didn’t name their fonts, which were all Roman, since they weren’t an option, like with IBM, and refered to them by size, Pica and Elite.)
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Look at it this way:
“A. D. 2000” means “in the year of our Lord 2000.”
“2000 A. D.” means “2000 in the year of our Lord.”
The second one doesn’t make sense!
In Article VII of the Constitution:
“Done in Convention…the seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred eighty-seven.” That’s a good enough standard for me.
Latin’s word-order is freer than other Indo-European languages, such as Russian, Sanskrit, or Greek.
I’m willing to concede that word order in Latin was flexible enough to allow the date to come before or after anno ab urbe condita, and by analogy probably Anno Domini. I have found 4 examples of the number following AAUC and two of the number preceding it. But I stand by my assertion that word order in Latin, as used by native speakers and writers in ancient times, was not as flexible as it is generally taught to be today. Certainly it was much more flexible than English is.
But in all six examples the number in Latin is ordinal, not cardinal. This is important because language mavens rail against such constructions as “May ten” and insist instead on “May tenth” or “May the tenth” or “the tenth of May.” I wonder why they don’t apply the same rule to the year. After all, 1999th and 2000th are not that much harder to write than 1999 and 2000. “Nineteen-ninety-ninth” is not much harder to say than “Nineteen-ninety-nine.”
I reiterate that “In the year of the Lord two thousand” does not make sense when you think about it. It only seems to make sense because we are used to it. “In the year of his life one” makes precious little sense compared to “In the first year of his life.”
