> The most surreal part of implementing the new calendar came in October 1582, when 10 days were dropped from the calendar to bring the vernal equinox from March 11 back to March 21. The church had chosen October to avoid skipping any major Christian festivals.
The "original" Julian calendar was indifferent to year number systems. The Romans typically used the consular year, although Marcus Terentius Varro "introduced" the ab urbe condita (AUC) system in the 1st century BC, which was used until the Middle Ages. From the 5th to the 7th century, the anno Diocletiani (also called anno martyrum) after emperor Diocletian was used primarily in the eastern empire (Alexandria), or the anno mundi (after the creation of the world). It was Dionysius Exiguus in the 6th century, who replaced the anno Diocletiani era with the Anno Domini era. His system become popular in the West, but it took a long time until it also was adopted in the East. Its application to years before the birth of Christ is very late: we come across it first in the 15th century, but it was not widespread before the 17th century.
All these systems used the Julian system for months and days, but differed in terms of the year and (partialy) in the first day of the year.
The century in which the switch occurred (which was different in different countries) was shorter than the others. As were the decade, year, and month in which the switch occurred.
No, the first century began Jan 1, 0000. Whether that year actually existed or not is irrelevant - we shouldn't change our counting system in the years 100, 200 etc.
There is no year zero according to first-order pedants. Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on context.
It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.
Yes but, is there such a thing as a zeroth-order pedant, someone not pedantic about year ordinality? As a first-order meta-pedant, this would be my claim.
Moreover, I definitely find the ordinality of pedantry more interesting than the pedantry of ordinality.
> It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.
Or, just to add more fuel to the fire, we could use the Holocene/Human year numbering system to have a year zero and avoid any ambiguity between Gregorian and ISO dates.
If only—I think most US citizens who actually work with units of measurement on a daily basis would love to switch to the metric system. Unfortunately, everyone else wants to keep our “freedom units” (and pennies)
We are all defacto ISO adherents by virtue of our lives being so highly computer-mediated and standardized. I’m fully on board with stating that there absolutely was a year zero, and translating from legacy calendars where necessary.
I vote for a year zero and for using two's complement for representing years before zero (because it makes computing durations that span zero a little easier).
What does that even mean? Do we allow for the distortion due to the shift from the Julian to Gregorian calendars, such that the nth year is 11 days earlier? Of course not, because that would be stupid. Instead, we accept that the start point was arbitrary and reference to our normal counting system rather than getting hung up about the precise number of days since some arbitrary epoch.
It means just what it says. In the common calendar, the year after 1 BC (or BCE in the new notation) was 1 AD (or CE in the new notation). There was no "January 1, 0000".