[HN Gopher] Let's stop counting centuries
___________________________________________________________________
Let's stop counting centuries
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 91 points
Date : 2024-07-05 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynomight.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynomight.net)
| gcp123 wrote:
| Author makes a good point. "1700s" is both more intuitive and
| more concise than "18th century". The very first episode of Alex
| Trebeck's Jeopardy in 1984 illustrates how confusing this can be:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTxS9_CwZA
|
| The "Final Jeopardy" question simply asked on what date did the
| 20th century begin, and all three contestants got it wrong,
| leading to a 3-way tie.
| semireg wrote:
| The right answer was, and still is: Jan 1, 1901
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| How can that be if 15 of those centuries are on the Julian
| calendar?
| whycome wrote:
| Also, when they switched things in 1582:
|
| https://www.britannica.com/story/ten-days-that-vanished-
| the-....
|
| > The most surreal part of implementing the new calendar
| came in October 1582, when 10 days were dropped from the
| calendar to bring the vernal equinox from March 11 back to
| March 21. The church had chosen October to avoid skipping
| any major Christian festivals.
| pdonis wrote:
| The century in which the switch occurred (which was
| different in different countries) was shorter than the
| others. As were the decade, year, and month in which the
| switch occurred.
| hgomersall wrote:
| No, the first century began Jan 1, 0000. Whether that year
| actually existed or not is irrelevant - we shouldn't change
| our counting system in the years 100, 200 etc.
| Izkata wrote:
| The calendar goes from 1 BC to 1 AD, there is no year 0.
| hgomersall wrote:
| What does that even mean? Do we allow for the distortion
| due to the shift from the Julian to Gregorian calendars,
| such that the nth year is 11 days earlier? Of course not,
| because that would be stupid. Instead, we accept that the
| start point was arbitrary and reference to our normal
| counting system rather than getting hung up about the
| precise number of days since some arbitrary epoch.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> What does that even mean?_
|
| It means just what it says. In the common calendar, the
| year after 1 BC (or BCE in the new notation) was 1 AD (or
| CE in the new notation). There was no "January 1, 0000".
| hgomersall wrote:
| As I said twice, whether that date actually existed or
| not is irrelevant.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> whether that date actually existed or not is
| irrelevant._
|
| No, it isn't, since you explicitly said to start the
| first century on the date that doesn't exist. What does
| _that_ even mean?
| rcoveson wrote:
| There is no year zero according to first-order pedants.
| Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in
| both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO
| 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on
| context.
|
| It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our
| relatively young calendar system way back into the past
| before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice.
| Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.
| jl6 wrote:
| We are all defacto ISO adherents by virtue of our lives
| being so highly computer-mediated and standardized. I'm
| fully on board with stating that there absolutely was a
| year zero, and translating from legacy calendars where
| necessary.
| hollerith wrote:
| I vote for a year zero _and_ for using two 's complement
| for representing years before zero (because it makes
| adding and subtracting a little easier).
| lostlogin wrote:
| Have a read of this, it's not how you think it is.
| https://www.historylink.org/File/2012
| glitcher wrote:
| Incorrect, this answer wasn't given in the form of a question
| ;)
| drivers99 wrote:
| There are numerous common concise ways to write the 18th
| century, at the risk of needing the right context to be
| understood, including "C18th", "18c.", or even "XVIII" by
| itself.
| anyfoo wrote:
| These are even _more_ impractical, so I wonder what your
| point is? I can come up with an even shorter way to say 18th
| century, by using base26 for example, so let 's denote it as
| "cR". What has been gained?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > very first
|
| It's actually the second.
|
| > Trebeck's
|
| Trebek's*
| card_zero wrote:
| Let's reform Alex Trebek's name, it's difficult.
| c0balt wrote:
| And while we are at it, Tim Apple
| runarberg wrote:
| In Icelandic the 1-based towards counting is used almost
| everywhere. People do indeed say: "The first decade of the 19th
| century" to refer to the 18-aughts, and the 90s is commonly
| referred to as "The tenth decade". This is also done to age
| ranges, people in their 20s (or 21-30 more precisely) are said
| to be _thritugsaldur_ (in the thirty age). Even the hour is
| sometime counted towards (though this is more rare among young
| folks), "ad ganga fimm" (or going 5) means 16:01-17:00.
|
| Speaking for my self, this doesn't become any more intuitive
| the more you use this, people constantly confuse decades and
| get insulted by age ranges (and freaked out when suddenly the
| clock is "going five"). People are actually starting to refer
| to the 90s as _nian_ (the nine) and the 20-aughts as _tian_
| (the ten). Thought I don't think it will stick. When I want to
| be unambiguous and non-confusing I usually add the -og-eitthvad
| (and something) as a suffix to a year ending with zero, so the
| 20th century becomes _nitjanhundrud-og-eitthvad_ , the 1990s,
| _nitiu-og-eitthvad_ and a person in their 20s (including 20)
| becomes _tuttugu-og-eitthvad_.
| jrockway wrote:
| On the other hand "1700s art" sounds like trash compared to
| "18th century art".
| rz2k wrote:
| How about if you say "settecento"? Maybe it is a new
| confusion that they drop a thousand years, and maybe it would
| imply Italian art specifically.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| If using "1700s", I'd write it as "art of the 1700s".
| Isamu wrote:
| Well yeah, most of the time if I want to be understood I will say
| "the 1700s" because it is straightforward to connect with
| familiar dates.
|
| We still say "20th century" though because that's idiomatic.
| macintux wrote:
| The author's point is that idioms change, and this one should.
| wwilim wrote:
| 1800-1899 is the eighteen-hundreds, 1800-1809 is the eighteen-
| noughties. Easy.
| James_K wrote:
| One point, the singular they has been in use for centuries, where
| this essay suggests it's a recent invention.
| networked wrote:
| The essay doesn't really say anything about when the singular
| "they" was _invented_. What it says is that it used to be low-
| status and unsophisticated language.
|
| > In the 1970s, fancy people would have sniffed at using "they"
| rather than "he" for a single person of unknown sex like this.
| But today, fancy people would sniff at not doing that. How did
| that happen?
|
| > I think "they" climbed the prestige ladder--people slowly
| adopted it in gradually more formal and higher-status
| situations until it was everywhere.
| dahart wrote:
| The essay's narrative is overly simplified and misleading
| about details. Singular they has been common for centuries.
| The idea that it was lower status is a more recent invention.
| The author might be referring more to use of they as a
| personal pronoun. Anyway, whatevs, language changes, that
| part of author's message is good.
| networked wrote:
| > This leaves ambiguous how to refer to decades like 1800-1809.
|
| There is the apostrophe convention for decades. You can refer to
| the decade of 1800-1809 as "the '00s" when the century is clear
| from the context. ( _The Chicago Manual of Style_ allows it:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299512.) If you wanted to
| upset people, you could try adding the century back: "the
| 18'00s". :-)
|
| There is also the convention of replacing parts of a date with
| "X" characters or an em dash ("--") or an ellipses ("...") in
| fiction, like "in the year 180X". It is less neat but unambiguous
| about the range when it's one "X" for a digit.
| (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YearX has an
| interesting collection of examples. A few give you the century,
| decade, and year and omit the millennium.)
|
| Edit: It turns out the Library of Congress has adopted a date
| format based on ISO 8601 with "X" characters for unspecified
| digits: https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/.
| James_K wrote:
| Another ambiguity, though perhaps less important, is that "2000s"
| could refer to 2000-2999.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| Could make the convention to say "the twenty hundreds" when
| referring to [2000, 2100), and "the two thousands" for [2000,
| 3000).
| whycome wrote:
| life in the 20s is weird.
| riffic wrote:
| Alternatively: the third millennium.
| milliams wrote:
| It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from
| zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works.
|
| We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of
| your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99,
| zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth
| century!
|
| At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing
| makes sense. Everyone's fought the x-century vs x-hundreds before
| so they welcome relief.
|
| Izzard had the right idea:
| https://youtu.be/uVMGPMu596Y?si=1aKZ2xRavJgOmgE8&t=643
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| > We do the same with people's ages.
|
| No, we don't.
|
| When we refer to 'the first year of life', we mean the time
| from birth until you turn 1.
|
| Similarly, you'd say something like 'you're a child in the
| first decade of your life and slowly start to mature into a
| young adult by the end of the second decade', referring to 0-9
| and 10-19, respectively.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > No, we don't.
|
| But practically speaking we usually do. I always hear people
| refer to events in their life happening "when I was 26" and
| never "in the 27th year of my life". Sure you could say the
| latter, but practically speaking people don't (at least in
| English).
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| "Half one" is archaic English, and common German, for
| 12:30. Similarly "my 27th year" just sounds archaic to me:
| I wonder if you went through a bunch of 19th century
| writing if you'd see ages more often be "Xth year" vs "X-1
| years old".
|
| There may be something cultural that caused such a shift,
| like a change in how math or reading is taught (or even
| that it's nearly universally taught, which changes how we
| think and speak because now a sizeable chunk of the
| population thinks in visually written words rather than
| sounds).
| einherjae wrote:
| Isn't "half one" used as a short form of "half past one"
| these days, I.e. 01:30? That has been a source of
| confusion for someone used to the Germanic way.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| That's not really indexing from 0 though. It's just
| rounding the amount of time you've lived down to the
| nearest year. You get the same number, but semantically
| you're saying roughly how old you are, not which year
| you're in. This becomes obvious when you talk to small
| children, who tend to insist on saying e.g "I'm 4 and a
| half". And talking about children in their first year, no
| one says they're 0. They say they're n days/weeks/months
| old.
| jcelerier wrote:
| The first year of life is the year indexed with zero, just
| like the first centimeter/inch in a ruler is the
| centimeter/inch indexed with zero
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| I agree, that was my point.
| Sardtok wrote:
| And so is the first century of the zero-indexed calendar.
| furyofantares wrote:
| On your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and call
| you a 5 year old all year.
|
| Can't say I've ever had to refer to someone's first year or
| first decade of their life, but sure I'd do that if it came
| up. Meanwhile, 0-indexed age comes up all the time.
| drdec wrote:
| > On your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and
| call you a 5 year old all year.
|
| If you are going to be that pedantic, I would point out
| that one only has one birthday.
|
| (Well, unless one's mother is extremely unlucky.)
| naniwaduni wrote:
| "Birthday" does not mean the same thing as "date of
| birth".
| kstrauser wrote:
| We don't 0-index people's ages. There are a million books about
| "baby's first year", while they're still 0 years old.
| User23 wrote:
| We also talk about someone's first day at work during that
| day.
| bmacho wrote:
| If you point at year long intervals, then those will be year
| long intervals indeed.
|
| Nevertheless the traditional "how old are you" system uses a
| number 1 less.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| How old is the baby now? Six months...
| Terretta wrote:
| Except we do, as soon as we need the next digit.
|
| In "figure of speech", or conventual use, people start
| drinking in their 21st year, not their 22nd. In common
| parlance, they can vote in their 18th year, not their 19th.
|
| We talk of a child in their 10th year as being age 10. Might
| even be younger. Try asking a people if advice about a child
| in their "5th year of development" means you're dealing with
| a 5 year old. Most will say yes.
|
| So perhaps it's logical to count from zero when there's no
| digit in the magnitude place, because you haven't achieved a
| full unit till you reach the need for the unit. Arguably a
| baby at 9 months isn't in their first year as they've
| experienced zero years yet!
|
| Similarly "centuries" don't have a century digit until the
| 100s, which would make that the 1st century and just call
| time spans less than that "in the first hundred years" (same
| syllables anyway).
|
| It's unsatisfying, but solves the off by one errors, one of
| the two hardest problems in computer science along with
| caching and naming things.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| What? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you
| are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are
| legal to drink in your 22nd year of life.
|
| You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this
| context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is
| awkward but the latter is just incorrect.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > we should have simply started counting centuries from zero
|
| Latin, like Lua, is 1-indexed.
| usrusr wrote:
| And look at the bloodshed that caused!
|
| https://douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
| IshKebab wrote:
| I feel like the Romans had an excuse for that mistake. Not
| sure about Lua.
| munchler wrote:
| If people start saying "zeroth century", it's only going to
| create confusion, because "first century" will then become
| ambiguous.
| wryoak wrote:
| I thought this article was railing against the lumping together
| of entire spans of hundreds of years as being alike (ie, we lump
| together 1901 and 1999 under the name "the 1900s" despite their
| sharing only numerical similarity), and was interested until I
| learned the author's real, much less interesting intention
| endofreach wrote:
| Many people find their own thoughts more interesting than the
| ones of others. Some write. Many don't.
| clob wrote:
| found poetry without the finding
| wavemode wrote:
| I do tend to say "the XX00s", since it's almost always
| significantly clearer than "the (XX+1)th century".
|
| > There's no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry.
|
| This isn't really an argument against the new convention, since
| even in the old convention there was no convenient way of doing
| so.
|
| People mostly just say "the early 2000s" or explicitly reference
| a range of years. Very occasionally you'll hear "the aughts".
| conception wrote:
| The 2000-2009's are the aughts!
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| The noughties!
| hansvm wrote:
| You ought naught to propose such noughts!
| kmoser wrote:
| I think you mean "twenty-aughts" (to differentiate them from
| the nineteen-aughts, 1900-1909).
| savanaly wrote:
| You can always just say "the 2000s" for 2000-2010. If the
| context is such that you might possibly be talking about the
| far future then I guess "the 2000's" is no longer suitable but
| how often does that happen in everyday conversation?
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| A lot of this runaround is happening because people get hung up
| on the fact that the "AD" era began as AD 1. But that year is not
| magic--it didn't even correlate with the year of Jesus's birth or
| death. So let's just start the AD era a year before, and call
| that year "AD 0". It can even overlap with BC 1. BC 1 is the same
| as AD 0. Fine, we can handle that, right? Then the 00s are [0,
| 100), 100s are [100, 200), etc. Zero problem, and we can start
| calling them the 1700s etc., guilt free.
| hgomersall wrote:
| This is the right answer.
| card_zero wrote:
| This reminds me that centuries such as "the third century BC"
| are even harder to translate into date ranges. That one's 201
| BC to 300 BC, inclusive, _backward._ Or you might see "the
| last quarter of the second millennium BC", which means minus
| 2000 to about minus 1750. [Edit: no it doesn't.]
|
| In fact archeologists have adapted to writing "CE" and "BCE"
| these days, but despite that flexibility I've never seen
| somebody write a date range like "the 1200s BCE". But they
| should.
| arp242 wrote:
| Some people have proposed resetting year 1 to 10,000 years
| earlier. The current year would be 12024. This way you can
| have pretty much all of recoded human history in positive
| dates, while still remaining mostly compatible with the
| current system. It would certainly be convenient, but I don't
| expect significant uptick any time soon.
|
| For earlier dates "n years ago" is usually easier, e.g. "The
| first humans migrated to Australia approximately 50,000 years
| ago".
| localhost8000 wrote:
| > you might see "the last quarter of the second millennium
| BC", which means minus 2000 to about minus 1750.
|
| From comparing some online answers (see links), I'd conclude
| that even though the numbers are ordered backward,
| "first"/"last"/"early"/"late" would more commonly be
| understood to reference the years' relative position in a
| timeline. That is, "2000 to about minus 1750" would be the
| first quarter of the second millennium BC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_century_BC (the "last
| century BC") https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/
| 1akt4zm/this... https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-first-half-
| of-the-1st-cent... https://www.quora.com/What-is-meant-by-
| the-2nd-half-of-the-5... etc
| card_zero wrote:
| Oh you're right, I tripped up. "The last quarter of the
| second millennium BC" means about minus 1250 to minus 1001.
|
| I often get excited by some discovery sounding a lot older
| than it actually is, for reasons like this.
| arp242 wrote:
| Things like "17th century", "1600s", or "1990s" are rarely
| exact dates, and almost always fuzzy. It really doesn't matter
| what the exact start and end day is. If you need exact dates
| then use exact dates.
|
| A calendar change like this is a non-starter. A lot of
| disruption for no real purpose other than pleasing some
| pedantics.
| jrockway wrote:
| I would also accept that the 1st century has one less year than
| future centuries. Everyone said Jan 1, 2000 was "the new
| millenium" and "the 21st century". It didn't bother anyone
| except Lua programmers, I'm pretty sure.
| pictureofabear wrote:
| We're too deep into this now. Imagine how much code would have
| to be rewritten.
| kleiba wrote:
| Meh, too small of an issue to be bothered about it.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| small issues are easy to solve!
|
| I think it isn't as sexy/interesting as what I thought the
| article was going to be about (about a different way of talking
| about our history, in eras maybe vs centuries or something).
|
| this strikes me as kind of like a small PR to our language that
| makes an incremental improvement to a clearly confusing thing.
| Should be easy to merge :)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, not easy. You want to change ao social convention? That
| is _not_ easy.
|
| Even changing all the places it got encoded into _software_
| probably wouldn 't be easy.
| acheron wrote:
| Sure, then we can switch to French Revolutionary metric time.
| runarberg wrote:
| > There's no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry.
|
| The author is wrong here. The correct way (at least in spoken
| West Coast American English) is _the Twenty-aughts_. There is
| even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the term:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aughts If you want to be fancy you
| could spell it like _the 20-aughts_. I suppose there is no
| spelling it with only digits+s though, which maybe what the
| author was looking for.
| whycome wrote:
| I think you actually just agreed with them.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Yes, author, we will all start counting just how you'd like us to
| because you make such a compelling argument. /s
|
| At the worst, this "problem" is a speedbump to discourse for the
| stupidest among us, and I'm in favor of keeping the current
| system because of that.
| t_mann wrote:
| > There's no good way to refer to 2000-2009
|
| I like the German _Nullerjahre_ (roughly, the nil years). Naught
| years or twenty-naughts works pretty well too imho.
| arp242 wrote:
| I've always written it like "1900s", and always considered "20th
| century" to be confusing. Having to mentally do c-- or c++ is
| confusing and annoying.
|
| I deal with the "2000s-problem" by using "00s" to refer to the
| decade, which everyone seems to understand. Sometimes I also use
| "21st century"; I agree with the author that it's okay in that
| case, because no one is confused by it. For historical 00s I'd
| probably use "first decade of the 1700s" or something along those
| lines. But I'm not a historian and this hasn't really come up.
| riffic wrote:
| Let's stop posting anti-intellectual tripe to orange site
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| > Did the American revolution happen before, during, or after the
| Enlightenment?
|
| I've no idea. When did the American revolution happen?
|
| Not everyone's cultural frame of reference is the same as yours.
| I can tell you when the Synod of Whitby happened, though.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The American and French Revolutions are a pretty big deal on
| the road to modern democracy, as well as being tied to 1700s
| Enlightenment ideals. Everyone educated should know this.
| IshKebab wrote:
| A pretty big deal _in America_. I don 't think knowledge of
| the exact date of the American Revolution is a requirement
| for education outside America. At least no more than
| "17something...ish".
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| "17something...ish" is enough to answer (or at least make a
| high confidence guess at) the original question (was the
| American Revolution contemporary with the enlightenment?)
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Nope, both combined happened over a decade or two, not a
| single date.
|
| Just as I was tasked to read about the Magna Carta (1215),
| Chinese revolution... 1930s/50s. WWII, etc.
|
| Of course one needs to be interested for the information to
| land.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Of course, they are important, but so are many other things -
| and speaking e.g. from a European POV, a lot of other events
| are simply much more salient and commonplace - and the same
| is probably even more true for other continents (would a
| random reasonably educated American or European person know
| when the Meiji restauration happened or when Latin America
| became independent?). You can't expect everyone to have
| memorised all the important dates.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| America was a backwater at the time and therefore the best
| place to experiment with European enlightenment ideals.
| Which it did, and was a direct factor in the French
| Revolution. I also learned about numerous revolutions in
| Latin America from Mexico to Bolivar to San Martin over the
| early 1800s.
|
| The events that directly affect the modern world should be
| covered in school. I'd say revolutions that created large
| modern states would be among them.
| Grom_PE wrote:
| I agree. Another good point to get rid of counting centuries
| would be that in some languages (Russian) centuries are written
| in Roman numerals. It's annoying having to pause and think of
| conversion.
| clob wrote:
| Roman Numerals are loathsome. I say this as someone who loves
| numbers and glyphs.
| huma wrote:
| Thankfully, most of us quit writing centuries in Roman numerals,
| it's about time we quit centuries as well :) Sadly, however, the
| regnal numbers continue to persist
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