The first decade of the Julien calendar had as many years as most people have fingers on their to hands that they use to count. The years numbered in Roman Numerals: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, Of course in those days they did not write IV for four or IX for nine—that came about after the printing press.
Even without zero, decades have 10 years—count from 1 to 10 or 0 to 9. Roman numerals were additive before then and afterwards required adding and subtracting but did not need 0 to be a placeholder because each numeral had a value I 1 V 5 X 10 L 50 C 100 D 500 M 1000 The used conventions such as brackets or frames or bars to denote large multiples to express larger numbers. You don’t use 0 to denote numbers in Roman numerals—if there are no I or X they are not listed. The number 1732 would be denoted MDCCXXXII in Roman numerals C.E. 1 follows immediately after 1 B.C.E.—one year earlier than year one is denoted 1 BCE high is important hen calculating spans of time that cross from before to after year 1. A person born in 10 B.C.E. and died in C.E. 10, attained age of 19, not 20. Dionysius invented the Anno Domini era about 525 C.E.—many people were expecting the end of the world to occur 500 years after the birth of Christ In calculating a table of the dates of Easter --the new moon, was zero. Dionysius was the first known medieval Latin writer to use a precursor of the number zero using Roman for Null and Nil. He stated Jesus’ birth as 525 years ago without saying why—historians mostly set the date at 1 BCE or sometimes 1AD and some others 4 BCE relative to other historic events. Y2K as the reason for the 1999-2000 celebrations in anticipation of the end of the world as we know it thanks to sloppy date routines in much of the computer code. Two thousand one paled by comparison to Kubric’s Space Odyssey. Donna Y [email protected] > On Jun 1, 2018, at 10:44 AM, R.E. Boss <[email protected]> wrote: > >> the first decade of the modern era (A.D., C.E.) has only 9 years in its >> "decade"--1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 (because there's no year 0). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
