Turning to trivia for a moment, I thought I’d raise the question of when the 21st century began. The commonsense view is that it began on 1 January 2000, and I think the commonsense view is right. Against this we get a bunch of pedants arguing, that, since there was no year zero, the 1st century (of the current era) began in 1CE, and therefore included 100CE. Granting this, the 21st century began on 1 January 2001.
The problem I have with all this is the claim that “there was no year zero”. It seems to imply that, on the first Christmas[1], the Jerusalem Post came out with a headline something like “Jesus Christ Born: Wise Men Announce New Dating System”. Since zero hadn’t been invented yet, there obviously wouldn’t have been a year 0, but on this assumption, there would have been a year 1. But of course, there wasn’t a year 1 either. In the hegemonic dating system of the time, this was 754 Ab Urbe Condita. No one would refer to dates Anno Domini for hundreds of years to come.
It’s true of course, that when our current system of dating was first proposed, by Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, zero still hadn’t been invented (or at least the concept hadn’t reached Christendom) and so, when, years were retrospectively dated, there still wasn’t a year zero in the system proposed then. But why should we be bound by the ignorance of a 6th century monk? If it suits us to have a year zero, why shouldn’t we have one? It’s obvious that there would be some overlap, in that 0 CE would be the same year as 1BCE, but I don’t see any problem with this. We can use the 0 CE to get the centuries right, 1BCE on the vanishingly rare occasions we need to refer to historical events in this year, and everything will go smoothly.
When we want a really sensible system, we can follow the astronomers who not only use 0CE but employ negative numbers for earlier dates.
Note Although I’ve never seen anyone else put this argument, once I’d worked it out, I had enough to Google on, and found this piece by Steven Dutch of the University of Wisconsin
fn1. There’s an obvious problem to with the day on which years are supposed to start, which I’ll skip over.
John Quiggin 
Interesting, if as you say somewhat trivial. Further complicated by the debate about the actual year Jesus Christ was born, as some scholars think it might have been no later than 4BCE, the year in which Herod the Great died.
It’s also possible (actually probable) that 25 December wasn’t his actual birthday either, given that 25 December is around mid-Winter’s day, and the Christmas holy-day was grafted onto earlier pagan midwinter festivals. The more you look at it, the more arbitrary it gets.
If common sense were always correct, there would be a great many fields of human endeavour that were unnecessary, including statistics. Since economics makes heavy use of statistics, it seems likely that a trained economist would know this – indeed, that he would often have had to deal tactfully with people who came to him with shiny new economic ideas based on their own common sense. At least, ideas they think are new (me, I have the humility to rearrange what my insights suggest as questions and then ask around to get a better idea).
So it is not a sufficient argument to appeal to common sense. JQ should be adducing a solid reason.
The reason there is no year zero is that years are measured as ordinal numbers (first, second etc). AD means the year of our Lord, so when He was born was the first year of our Lord. As you point out,it could not have been otherwise, since zero had not been discovered.
“…I’ve never seen anyone else put this argument, once I’d worked it out…”
Good grief! Anyone would think you’d just worked out the theory of relativity or rank dependent expected utilty or some similar revelation. I think the observation that we can make 2000 the beginning of the milennium by pretending there was a year zero, is about as banal as any I have heard for some time.
Joe said it. It’s not about when zero was invented, it’s about ordinality vs. cardinality. There is no zeroth year in the reign of a monarch, they always start with their first year.
Given the importance of the absolute dating system that we now use, the origin of its axis really is arbitrary but we continue to use these archaic concepts such as centuries and millennia (i.e. why is this the twenty-first century when all the dates are in the twenties? Surely, the first hundred years after the birth of Jesus should have been called the zeroth century etc.)
Perhaps we should scrap the lot and invent a new nomenclature. Centuriads and millenniads, anyone?
So 1AD (or 1CE, or -2300 Of the Immortal Reign of the Glorious Traal, Ever-Living Emperor) lasted precisely 6 days, then?
It’s funny (well, it amuses me) to look at both sides of the milennium issue from a geek’s POV. On the one hand, it makes sense to start counting from zero, and that’s often what geeky types do. On the other hand, there’s a lot of people we’d like to pretend are stupid who called 2000 the start of the new milennium.
So we’re looking at a basic conflict between the idea of counting like a computer, or of returning to the “normal person’s” method and being able to scorn the inferior ignoramuses out there…
I don’t think it’s about cardinality v. ordinality, but rather discrete v. continuous. A year is not an arbitrary interval on a number line, but a coherent irreducible, entityn with its own personality, like a golf hole. And you have a beer and reflect at the eighteenth green, not the eighteenth tee.
Anyway, echoing Mark’s last point, why is John bent on putting us superior types out of business? Next he’ll be arguing for apostrophe reform or some similar horror!
John’s argument rests on: ‘if it suits us to have a year zero, why shouldn’t we have one?’ It’s a weak foundation on which to rest a case. The calendar we use either does have a year zero or it doesn’t. As John acknowledges, it doesn’t, and the first year was year 1, and there are 100 years in a century and 1000 in a milennium, so the third millenium began in 2001. So on the facts outlined in John’s post, contrary to his illogical judgement, and notwithstanding that this qualifies me as a pedant, the commonsense view is wrong.
James, you’ll be pleased to know that I’m a militant on the correct use of apostrophes. With one exception, this means I support the standard rules.
My only objection to orthodoxy is it’s insistence that the possessive of the third person neuter pronoun should (unlike all similarly formed words) not have an apostrophe. This rule, which apparently derives it’s rationale from the fact that it’s possible to get confused with the contraction for “it is” should be scrapped.
JQ, meaning no offence, you literally and precisely don’t know what you’re talking about concerning the use of apostrophes to form genitives.
They represent omissions of letters, as in that first sentence of mine. Digression: the circumflex does the same in French, when the ommission is usually an “s” – although a retired French professor has told me that a huge chunk has been dropped to form “meme” (sadly, I don’t know how to show that circumflex). g “-es” as English evolved. Some words were irregular to start with, like “its” or “mine” which never had an “-es” ending. The confusion arises from the similarity of “its” and “it’s” (representing a contraction of “it is” and not a genitive at all), but which coincidentally lead to the same ending sound and – in the case of “it’s” – the same ending spelling pattern as the contraction of “-es”. (You will also find the old form embedded in some odd compound words, like “Wednesday”).
The apostrophe has nothing to do with a genitive at all. Or should we insert an unnecessary one in “yours”, for consistency, and upgrade “mine” to “mine’s”? How then would I say “mine’s a pint”?
Cobbler, stick to your last. Or are you becoming a troll in your own home? If so, don’t piss on your own doorstep.
Damn! Some editing problems there, from the new browser (Arachne). Discuss the omitted text among yourselves – or use an apostrophe.
PML, if there’s a choice between regularisation and etymology we should go for regularisation every time. If the result is that we get your’s as a possessive, that doesn’t worry me at all.
While I agree with the principle, JQ, I was pointing out that there was another, quite different, principle involved: the apostrophe indicates omitted letters. Certainly, the Germanic genitive ending “-es” could be replaced consistently with “-‘s”, adjusting “its”, yours”, etc., but then you get a clash with the other uses of apostrophes, like “it’s” for “it is”, and the regularisation you seek is actually doing no more than embedding the etymology! True regularisation would lead to dropping the apostrophes from all genitives, not inserting spurious ones to maintain a pattern among genitives at the expense of destroying the pattern among omitted letters.
I see that my wording might read a little intemeperately; it was merely that it struck me that you were yourself going too far, in bringing out not one but two attempts at changing usage to suit yourself. If I have any prejudice along those lines, it is the small-c conservative one of preferring descriptive approaches over prescriptive ones.
The 1st year began at 1/1/1 and ended at 31/12/1.
The 2000th year began at 1/1/2000 and ended at 31/12/2000. That was the end of the second millenium.
Therefore 1/1/2001 was the start of the third millenium (and of the 21st century).
I really cannot see what is so hard about the concept. One does not need academic credentials to understand it. In fact you can explain it to any reasonably bright 10 year old.
Yes many innumerate idiots prefer to believe 1/1/2000 was the beginning of the 21st century. I don’t begrudge them that as I don’t begrudge them watching and enjoying CSI.
Both, however, show the same disregard for reality.
A less parochial perspective on the Year Zero issue comes from one of the international students in my government-business relations classes. After I cited the Magna Carta being signed in 1215 as a significant episode in the evolution of constitutional government, this Chinese student corrected “1215” to “a long time ago”.
FWIW, I’m not only in favor of Jan 1 being the start of the new millenium, but I’m also in favor of calling the 1st century the 0th, so as to make the years 2000-2099 the 20th, not the 21st century. To me, it feels better to have things change over when the first digit changes, like when counting. Imagine counting to ten like this: 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 10.1!
Considering how fuzzy and inexact all this “our era starts on some wanker’s birthday” is, and considering how we’ll never really know whether our calendar is totally accurate anyways, why not just make the assumptions we have to in order for the (IMO) more natural counting system to work?
But then again, I’m sympathetic to exponents of metric time…