Subject:
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Re: When did the 3rd millennium start?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Tue, 2 Jan 2001 14:31:17 GMT
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Reply-To:
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mattdm@/spamless/mattdm.org
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Viewed:
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952 times
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Frank Filz <ffilz@mindspring.com> wrote:
> that my 38th year is nearly over, and that my age is 37. But 2001 is the
> 2000th year since what? A totally made up date with no relevance since it
Doesn't matter. It's the *2001st* year since we started counting. Not
2000th: I think that's what you're missing. *Last* year was the 2000th year;
that's why it was called "2000".
> isn't even the 2000th year of the use of that particular numbering system.
> Heck, by that kind of logic, you might argue that I'm now 38, after all, I
> was born in 1963 and it's now 2001, never mind that it's 2 more months til
> the anniversary of my birthday.
Well, as I said in my post, you are *in* your 38th year. We count birthdays
differently, which makes some sort of sense -- for age, the amount you have
completed is what is significant. For years, we're talking about what you're
*in*. That's why this is January *of* 2000, not "January past 2000". If you
wanted to give your age more specifically, you'd say "I'm 37 and 10 months".
You could argue that we should shift the way we count years to be like this,
but that wouldn't make sense without some changes to our language
And changing to this strongly suggests undertaking a renumbering of all
previous years, because currently, arbitrary or not, there's a smooth
transition around the starting point, with the year after being 1 CE (or AD)
and the one before that being 1 BCE (or BC). If you're counting years
completed, you need a zero (just like people have until their first
birthday).
--
Matthew Miller ---> mattdm@mattdm.org
Quotes 'R' Us ---> http://quotes-r-us.org/
Boston University Linux ---> http://linux.bu.edu/
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: When did the 3rd millennium start?
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| (...) No we don't need to renumber all the previous years. We just need to give the year 1 BC two names. Or we can be non-anal about it and accept that to the average person, it makes more sense that the millenium starts in 2000 not 2001. On the (...) (24 years ago, 2-Jan-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: When did the 3rd millennium start?
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| (...) You're totally ignoring my point. My point is that the relevancy of how we call things is so little, that what makes the most sense to me is to say that decades start when the last digit of the year turns 0, centuries start when the last two (...) (24 years ago, 2-Jan-01, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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