Re: Ebisedian number system (I)

--- In conlang@y..., Tim May <butsuri@B...> wrote:

> Well, it's the first year before the start.  You don't get zeroes when
> you count things, only when you measure things.
When you count things, you get natural numbers, that is, positive
integers.  As soon as you take negative numbers into account, zero
is part of the deal, and leaving it out is just inconsistent.

Consider:  Between the beginnings of the years 100 AD and 300 AD lie
exactly 200 years.  Between the beginnings of the years 300 BC and
100 BC lie exactly 200 years.  But between the beginnings of the years
100 BC and 100 AD lie 199 years.

Obviously, if we tried to map those two separate systems of reckoning
onto a single continuous set of numbers, we'd have to call the year
100 BC the year -99 AD, not -100 AD!  That's the counterintuitive
part.

The distances between the years appear inconsistent. It's like a
non-trivial metric tensor at a point in an otherwise flat space-time.
It produces all sorts of ugly Christoffel symbols and Riemannian
curvature tensors.  =P



> We could name years
> for the number of years since the origin (start of January 1, 1CE
> (which would become 0CE) but that would give us two years zero.
Not at all.  Just call the year in which Christ was born the year
0 AD = 0 BC, then we'd have no problem.  The year 100 BC would be
-100 AD, and distances between the systems would be consistent.

Our current system splits the continuum into two parts, and maps each
onto the natural numbers.  That's more complicated and less intuitive
IMHO.  I can see no reason why the time before Christ should be
viewed as a different continuum as the time after Christ.

What I've always found especially counterintuitive about the current
system:  If the year 1 before Christ's birth is immediately followed
by the year 1 after Christ's birth -- where is the year in which
Christ was born?


-- Christian Thalmann

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