You know what never gets old? The comedic timing of Bronson Pinchot. Oh, or the debate about when the millennium started. I accidentally brought it up in a comment last week, and then Amy responded to my comment. So I felt the need to trot out the issue in a full-post forum. I apologize. I really do. But nevertheless....
First off, I see this as a separate issue from the decade debate. 1999 was clearly the end of the Nineties, which made 2000 the first of the next decade (the Zippos, the Ainties, whatever - see previous blog post). A decade really is any grouping of ten years. I have no problem with that.
As for the millennium, let's start with something we can all agree to - a millennium, by definition, consists of exactly one thousand years, right? Excellent. (But see the postscript, at your peril.)
Therefore, to find out whether the new millennium began in 2000 or 2001, we need to find out when the previous one ended and count to a thousand from there. The answer? Well, either 999 or 1000, I guess. That wasn't so helpful. I guess we actually need to go back one more millennium.
A dusty village in the Middle East. In the Roman province of Judea. Inns, being in short supply to begin with, were completely unavailable to a young carpenter and his wife, who was great with child. Soon that child lay swaddled in a manger. This child was Jesus. The year? Good question. The Romans probably called it Cæsar Augustus XLIV or something like that, because I think they measured years from each emperor's reign. Using the current system, though, we now think it was somewhere between 3 B.C. (B.C.E.) and 6 A.D. (C.E.). But that's a digression for millennium-tracking purposes.
We measure years based on the date that Christ was once accepted to have been born, and every year since he was born is part of his reign - the Year of the Lord, Anno Domini. So the entire issue of the millennium comes down to this: was there a Year 0? If you say yes, and go ..., 2 B.C., 1 B.C., 0, 1 A.D., 2 A. D., ... and start counting with 0 as the first year of the first millenium, then the last year of the first millenium was 999, and the last year of the second millennium was 1999, thus making 2000 the first year of the third millennium. If you say no, and go ..., 2 B.C., 1 B.C., 1 A.D., 2 A.D., ..., then 1 was the first year of the first millennium, 1001 was the first year of the second millenium, and 2001 was the first year of the current one.
So which is it? I think it's clear that there was no Year 0 and that the new millennium started in 2001. Why? First, look at the way we divide the years. We have B.C. and A.D. Before Christ, and Anno Domini, or Year of the Lord. Under this framework, there cannot be any years between B.C. and A.D. Whichever year Christ was born, the previous year had to have been the last year before he was born. And that same year had to be the first year of his reign. There's no room for Year 0.
More commonsensically, ask yourself - where do you start counting things? With 0, or with 1? If I said, "Count the fingers on your right hand," would you say, "0, 1, 2, 3, 4" or "1, 2, 3, 4, 5"? Of course, we start counting with 1. So it makes sense that we would count years the same way.
I think the problem stems from the fact that we subconsciously analogize the B.C./A.D. framework to the number line we all learn in algebra. The number line goes ..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ... . And B.C. years seem kind of like negative years, since they came before the A.D. years. So there must be a Year 0, since there's a zero in between negative and positive integers.
The analogy doesn't work, though, because, unlike the integers, the two year-numbering systems aren't part of one unbroken set - they are two separate sets. One set consists of all the years before Jesus was born, and the other consists of the year he was born and the following ones.
Imagine you're at P.E. in middle school (without the awkwardness and self-consciousness, if that's possible). The coach tells everyone to line up. Next, the coach splits the line in two, and tells one half to turn to the left, and the other to turn away from them, to the right. It still looks from afar like we have one continuous line of middle schoolers, but now we have two teams, Team Blue and Team Green. The coach tells Team Blue to count off, and they do - "1, 2, 3, 4, ...". Then, "Team Green, count off!" "Yes, coach! 1, 2, 3, 4, ...". As you can see, there is no Middle Schooler 0. There are two teams, back-to-back, each starting with 1. Similarly, there are two adjacent sets of years, each one beginning with 1.
Okay, that's it. I hope I've convinced everyone reading this blog that 2000 was the end of the millennium and that 2001 was the beginning of the new one. If not, I hope you enjoyed your trip down Memory Lane, getting pegged by the bullies in dodge ball.
P.S. I'm sure no one cares by now, but you can throw a whole new monkey wrench into the debate by asking about the effect of switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars. January 1, 1 A.D. on the Julian calendar is NOT exactly 2, 000 years before January 1, 2001 A.D. on the Gregorian calendar. There's currently a 13 day difference between the two calendars. Today would still be December 29, 2009 if we hadn't switched. Luckily for us all, I'm too exhausted to examine the ramifications of that now. Here's hoping you all have a safe and happy Julian New Year's Eve on Wednesday night.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Another issue is that zero wasn't really invented as a number until about 500-600 AD. The romans kind of had a zero-like placeholder by about 130 AD, but didn't have the balls to make it a number.
I am relatively dispassionate on this issue. I support having decades being 0-9 and even centuries being 00-99 because it's all arbitrary anyway, the way we decided to divide up the years for our own purposes, so why not make it easy? It's just as valid to thing about decades as it is to think abuot heptades or nonades -- we just naturally dig the number 10 and, by extension, 100, and 1000. So maybe the first century AD is actually only 99 years, from 1 to 99. Oh well. It hardly matters -- we just talk about the first century so we can get a ballpark figure of when something occurred. They're functional definititions to me, and therefore don't need to be mathematically precise.
And I'm in favor of centuries being 000 to 999, and that the 20th century ended in 1999. Again, it's all arbitrary how we divide up periods of time anyway, so why not make it easy and say that all years that start with "1" are of one century? So that means the first millenium was only 999 years. Oh well. Close enough.
I'm conflicted on this. On the one hand, I really don't mind when people use "the 1900s" and "the 20th Century" synonymously, even though I think that under most logical analyses, the 20th century was 1901-2000.
And, I guess, even calling 2000 the start of a new millennium isn't so bad. It's true, after all, that a millennium is any collection of 1,000 years. In fact, we just started a new millenium that will end at 12:05 PM PST January 13, 2011. Hurray! Somebody start with some fireworks and anticlimactic computer bugs!
Maybe my only issue is with calling 2000 the start of the third millennium, because that obviously references the Gregorian calendar system, which didn't complete its 2,000th year until 2001.
Or maybe, just maybe, my heart is two sizes too small.
I think the whole problem is terminology. If we all just said, "it's the end of the nineteens!" no one would or could argue. Insisting on using these marshmallowy terms like "millenia" just gives all the Comic Book Guys of the English-speaking world to argue about while everyone else moves on with their lives.
Maybe because "tonight we're gonna party like it's two-thousand" has bad rhythm and no impact - that's all we should worry about.
I wonder what our society would be like if we just had a Year Now and Years Back Then? Why do we bother numbering them at all? (don't feel compelled to answer that). Counting years just makes me feel old because when I think about how I was born in 1975, I inevitably think about how to the Aught kids today, I'm just like people who were born in 1875 were to turn-of-the-century kids. Which then makes me think of how when my kids are, like, 80, I'm going to be dead. Unless I live to be 110. Which would rock. If we just say, though, "Years Back Then," I don't have to think about the fact that the Back Then that I remember, like before cell phones, just gets farther and farther away....
Post a Comment