Re: Representable date range: experiment results
Re: Representable date range: experiment results
- Subject: Re: Representable date range: experiment results
- From: "Nigel Garvey" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:57:41 +0100
Mark J. Reed wrote on Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:45:23 -0400:
>On 10/20/05, Nigel Garvey <email@hidden> wrote:
>>In the Gregorian calendar, 0 is obviously a nonsense value for a year. As
>> are negatives.
>
>
>Untrue, especially in the Gregorian calendar. Astronomers, to pick an
>example, tend to use 0 and negative years CE, reckoned on the Gregorian
>calendar, instead of switching to BCE.
What astronomers tend to use is for their own convenience; it's not the
Gregorian calendar per se. It's convenient for them to equate years to
cardinal numbers so that they can do mathematical calculations with them.
The numbers in a calendar are ordinals (first Year of our Lord, first day
of March, first month of the year) which identify particular periods with
respect to the era in which they occur. (In this case, the "Christian
Era".) The "0th Year of our Lord" is as meaningless as the "0th of September".
>The often-heard statement that "there was no year 0" is misleading.
How? It's absolutely true. It's only misleading in that it implies that
someone living at the time would have experienced a transition from year
1 BC to year 1 AD, whereas in fact the AD numbers were applied only
retrospectively sometime in (what we now call) the sixth or seventh
centuries and the BC numbers some time after that. Many people have been
misled too into explaining the lack of a year 0 as due to the fact that
the number 0 wasn't invented until a few hundred years after the
Christian calendar was. But they've been thinking numbers rather than
calendars.
Even mathematically, zero represents either nothing or a start point from
which something is measured. If it's used to measure time it should
ideally be at the junction of two years, not applied to an entire one.
> There is
>indeed a year that can correctly be identifed as 0 AD; it's just that it is
>the *same* year that is conventionally identified as 1 BC.
I hope the discussion above has sorted this out. Both numbers are
conventions. "Year 0" is a useful mathematical idea. "0 AD" is not part
of the calendar and is linguistic nonsense. "1 BC" is part of the
calendar and notionally represents "the first year Before Christ".
I agree with much of the rest of your post. I think the fact that
AppleScript date mathematics gets BC year numbers right must be an
incidental by-product of the process, since we're not supposed to see them.
NG
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