this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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So 2000 was still 2nd millennium?
Don't you remember all the pedantic asshats saying that 2000 wasn't a new century? "There was no year zero!", "People just want all the digits to change!", "You're celebrating a year early!"
I don't, to be honest. I wasn't exposed to much pedantry back then. I wasn't exposed to many people on general, but that's not a conversation for this place :D
I'm an old fart who graduated high school in '99, so I was right in the middle of all the blossoming internet pedantry.
You're in a safe space among friends here, feel free to expose yourself whenever you want!
...wait...
Expose myself? What kind of amateur fighter do you take me for?
oooh that kind of expose!
Nah, I had no PC or internet, not many friends and my parents didn't do a lot of the "meet up with other parents so the kids can play together" stuff because we're all socially dysfunctional.
They've now moved on to "water isn't wet, it makes things wet".
I guess it's nice they want to be smart at least, even though their idea of smart is to copy some bit of pedantry they saw someone else do.
Yes, but most people ignored it and celebrated the new millennium at the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000 anyway.
See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium#Debate_over_millennium_celebrations
It's quite interesting. For example Fidel Castro made sure that Cuba celebrated correctly at the end of year 2000. And the U.S. Naval Observatory, official timekeeper for the country, held a party for the new milennium then too.
Can't we just redefine it? That doesn't seem reasonable in my mind.
(This is a joke, I know how awful that would go)
We have redefined it. The thing about language is no one controls it. If enough people want to call 2000 the start of the new millennium, then that's when it was. It's all arbitrary numbers anyway.
I meant in the sense of "Make Year 1 Year 0, shift all dates back one year, cause a lot of headaches when dealing with dates written down before year shift vs after year shift, but at least the 3rd millennium now properly starts at 2000", but you have a better point
If we were to redefine it I wonder what way we'd go. Make -1 the first year of the first century and go in consistent 100 year steps from there? Or just accept that the first century and the first millenium are a little shorter than a hundred or a thousand years respectively?
Name "-1" year zero and have that be the start of the first century and millennium, would probably be the most reasonable option.
The idea I originally had would have been to decrement the year numbers, so that year 1 is now y0, 546 is 545 and 2001 is 2000. But changing existing dates is a recipe for nightmares, so let's not.
With that version you're still changing some historical dates though, like dates of death for roman emporers. Admittedly it is less of a problem though because you need to do the conversion from their calendar to ours anyway. It's just that modern documents containing already converted dates would now be off in retrospect.
On a 1' ruler, the first half inch ends at 0.5". All of the measurements within that first inch are "0.x". "1.x" will be in the second inch. "2.x" is in the third inch.
Calendars don't work like that. 1 January 1AD is in the first year, not the second. 31 December 1AD is still in the first year.
364 days after his (ostensible) birth was December 31st, 1AD. At midnight that night (364.999... days) 1 full year was complete, and we entered the second year.
3650 days after 1 January 1AD is 1 January 11AD.
36500 days after 1 January 1 AD is 1 January 101AD.
365000 days after 1 January 1AD is 1 January 1001AD.
31 December 2000 was the last day of the second millenia. The first day of the third millenia was 1 January 2001.
Year 1 AD would have started on March 1st, as Pope Gregory hadn’t happened yet. Also, no-one knew they were in the Julian Calendar AD yet either.
See, the ruler analogy is why I was so confused, because that's how, intuitively, I would have expected it to work. I just never actually checked if that's correct, and now it turns out that it's not.
Yes, the third rolled in 1 jan 2001.
Apparently yeah. In fact, it's actually easy to tell which years are in the 2nd millenium just by knowing its final year.
But people chose to celebrate the new millenium in 2000 because it's much more fun to have every single digit in a calendar year change than having only one digit change and calling it "a new millenium". Also, January 1, 2000 looks and feels so much cooler in my opinion, unless you write it in the dd/mm/yy format (mm/dd/yy wouldn't make much of a difference), in which case 01/01/01 has that nice satisfying feeling of all variables being the same value.
That was the point of my question, the disbelief of "wait, 2k is the last year and not 1999?"
And I think it would be even easier if one could just look at the thousands digit and tell from that. It would be even more easier if the millennia and years and such were all 0-indexed, so you'd have the zeroth millennium spanning 0-999, the first millennium 1000-1999, the 19th century would be 1900-1999...
Would be nice, but unfortunately you can't change a calendar system the world is so incredibly used to. Just the change from the Julian to the Gregorian was a massive change.
I know, I can but dream...