Kaare Rasmussen wrote:
> > There was no year zero for the same reason that if I hold up 2 fingers
> > you would say I was holding up 2 fingers, not that I was holding up 1.
> > We don't start counting stuff at zero.
>
> So that's the "scientific" proof that the millenium ends at 2000
> instead of 1999? Not very convincing.
>
> I've always wondered why people talk about the scientific view of the
> millenium. Still wonder, has to admit, but this is no discussion for
> the suse linux list.
I rather like Tony Halsell's and Bjorn Fahller's justifications, but they're
not really directly relevant. No-one consciously chose a counting system at all
and since Yeshua ben Iussef's significance was unknown to the world until he was
a man no-one would have been counting at all until much later, probably after
the crucifixion.
It's just that the early Christians got into the habit of naming each year in
terms of the reign of their "king" Jesus Christ ("in the fortieth year of our
Lord" and "in the year of our Lord 540"), much as the Romans of that era (the
prevailing culture) did in naming each year after the reign of the emperor (e.g.
"the third year of the reign of Augustus"). The common usage of this phraseology
in either English Greek or Latin defines the first year of someone's reign as
the first year after their arrival; the idea of a year zero would be entirely
useless in this context even if they had believed in the number zero, which they
did not.
Represented in mathematical terms, please compare the counting of years to the
counting of intervals rather than points. Thus if the birth of Christ is defined
as time t=0, and counting in years so that the end of the first year is t=1 and
the end of the second year is t=2, then the time elapsed between t=0 and t=1 is
interval i=1 and the time between t=1 and t=2 is interval i=2. There is no
interval i=0 by definition using this scheme.
Ralph
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] Ralph Clark, Virgo Solutions Ltd (UK)
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