The reason why many folk get confused about calendar numbers, is that they fail to understand the difference between Ordinal numbers & Cardinal numbers.
Ordinal numbers are an orderly identification tag (like a Licence plate number), they are meant to aid the sorting of identities. They should not be used as measures or in calculations.
Cardinal numbers, on the other hand, are those used in counting, measuring & calculating.
Calendar numbers are almost exclusively Ordinal numbers, (this is why the calendar system starts with 1 meaning first (ie order not count), and although there is only a unit difference, that one unit can stuff-up a calculation every time.
All other measurements (including time) are Cardinal numbers (having a zero reference point).
Yes, the decade, century, & millennium begin with 1 (first), & end with a zero.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the third millennium.
Yes, you’re essentially right about cardinal and ordinal numbers.
As to the original column, I may have mentioned this in another thread, but the Romans didn’t generally use A.U.C. dates, although they did have them. They used “in the year when N.N.N. and M.M.M. were consuls.” The idea of just giving years permanent serial numbers appears to have been both hard to invent and socially resisted until RCism forced the issue.
The Indiction was a 15-year fiscal cycle. What with calendars being in such a mess, the Indiction Number was frequently used as a double-check.
Yes, and one result of the difference, tyles, is happens when scholars are forced to make certain calculations. If they forget that there was no year “0” they may, for instance, get 20 as the number of years between 10 BC/BCE and 10 AD/CE. The pure “subtraction” result is wrong. The true answer is 19.
And it might only be ten if you’re in China. China, like the United States, considers the floor at street level to be both the ground floor and the first floor. But China has the same superstition about the number four that America has about thirteen and as a result some buildings skip the fourth floor and go directly from a third floor to a fifth floor.
Don’t rely on that difference between “ground floor” and “first floor”, though. Some European buildings follow the “American” rule, and some American buildings follow the “European” rule.
John, I’ll take your word for it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a building in the US where there was a Ground floor and a 1st floor that were different. Of course, some buildings have multiple “ground” floors and/or “Lobby” floors and/or mezzanine levels, and the numbering is somewhat arbitrary.
I remember buildings in Wellington NZ, where the ground floor on one side was 4 or more floors above the ground floor on the other side. I bet that’s common in Hong Kong too, for the same reason.
To take the most obvious example to me, the 1950s co-op in New York that my wife grew up in, and where her mother still lives, has a “ground floor” with the main and secondary entrances and the lobby, and a “first floor” above it. And, though I don’t recall where anymore, I remember going “Hmmm!” when I encountered a building in London with the entrance on the “first floor”.
Now if you want oddity, I know some condos in New Jersey with the main entrances on the 18th floor. (They’re built on a cliffside.)
