The year dot (was: Ebisedian number system)

On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at 09:55 , Christian Thalmann wrote:

{snip}
>
> You can always blame it on religion, which is probably even older
> than counting, and can justify just about any counterintuitive
> social feature.  Just think of how there's no year "0" in our time
> reckoning!  ;-)
I know religion bashing is a favorite hobby of some, but this is, I think,
one of the most silly examples I have seen.

It has obviously escaped Mr Thalmann's noticed that zero simply did
not figure in earlier number systems!   Never used Roman numbers?

I suppose the Romans left out zero because of the strictures of their pagan
religion.  And they also had no year 0, reckoning their years from the
supposed
date of the founding of Rome (753 BC).  To them 753 BC was 'anno I AVC (ab
urbe
condita), 754 was 'anno II AVC' etc; and 752 was 'anno primo ante urbem
conditam'
'the first year before the founding of the city'.   Tut, tut - How
counterintuitive
of them to have no year 0.  It must be due to their religion.

As we say in this neck of the woods: COBBLERS!

Before the Romans, neither the Greeks, nor the Egyptians nor the
Babylonians, for
their undoubted mathematical prowesss, developed the concept of zero as a
number.
I know it may upset the sophisticated moderns, but the simple fact is that
for
millennia upon millennia homines sapientes successfully lived out their
lives without
that concept *and it had nothing to do with all their many different
religious
beliefs.*
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On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at 11:45 , Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- 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.
Yes, but how exactly were negative numbers expressed in Roman numerals?
How in Greek, Egyptian or Babylonian numerals?

They weren't.  I suspect that without a proper understanding of zero, one
does not develop the a proper concept of negative numbers.  Good grief!
I can think of many non-mathematical people now in 2002 who still find the
concept
of _negative_ numbers, as understood by mathematicians, somewhat hazy and
certainly
not intuitive.

Consider also that, unlike us, the ancients normally counted time
_inclusively_;
e.g. if you were to ask a Roman how many months to the end of the year, s/
he'd
not have answered "quinque" (12 - 7 = 5), but "sex", i.e. July, Aug., Sept.
, Oct.,
Nov., Dec.   Now for people who (a) habitually reckon time inclusively, and
(b) do not have the concept of zero, then BC/AD system is absolutely
intuitive.

> Consider:  Between the beginnings of the years 100 AD and 300 AD lie
> exactly 200 years.
In fact the ancients would reckon the number of years from 100 to 300 AD as
201.  I know you said "beginnings" - but that just ain't they way they
thought
or reckoned things.   And it had nowt whatever to do with any of the
religions
practiced in earlier times.

> 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.
No - anyone in the "pre-zero" days would have thought you a bit simple.
They
would for start reckon it as 200 years and think you had miscounted with
your
199; and then, if they were kind, they'd have patiently tried to explain
that
100 years + 100 years = 200 years.

Yes, I know mathematically that's not so.  But not all mathematics is by
any
means intuitive the 'person in the street'.

Indeed, as Tim has rightly reminded us, we are dealing here with *counting*
,
just plain, ordinary counting as, e.g. a shepherd might do counting in
sheep.
We're not dealing with math(s).  I have been teaching students computer
science
for the past 12 years and my experience is, in fact, that for the "ordinary
person" counting from zero is not intuitive; indeed, it is
counterintuitive.

In computing, to keep the dumb machine happy, we usually begin counting
from
zero; we talk, e.g. of the zeroth (or is it 'zeroeth'?) bit, the zeroth
element
in an array etc.  How often is 'zeroth' ever heard in everyday speech?
Why is it
that natlangs lack an ancient word for "zero"?  (Yes, they have words for
'nothing',
'none', 'no' etc but not the mathematical zero).  More often than not my
16, 17, 18
year old students, who come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and
adhere to
many different religions and, many, to no religion, find counting from zero
counterintuitive?  And if I ask them to number elements or whatever off in
reverse
from a starting point, they will more often than not go: "1, 2, 3......"
etc from
right to left.  That's the intuitive method.

They can handle zero and negative numbers well enough in mathematical
calculation,
and money transaction.  But in plain old counting things along, it's the
millennia
ancient 1, 2, 3......n, whatever direction you go - no zero or negatives.
And nothing
whatever to do with religion - just plain human cussedness.

{snip}
> Not at all.  Just call the year in which Christ was born the year
> 0 AD = 0 BC, then we'd have no problem.
Well we would.  We don't know exactly in which year Christ was born.  We
need our
time-traveler to check it out.

{snip}
> Our current system splits the continuum into two parts, and maps each
> onto the natural numbers.  That's more complicated and less intuitive
> IMHO.
And it is an opinion obviously not shared by most homines sapientes since
our
species emerged many millennia back in Africa.  You are thinking as a
mathematician.

> 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?
Somewhere round about 6 BC I'd guess.

Most people seem to cope well enough with our system; for those who don't
like it or,
more particularly, where accurate calculation is required, there _is_
another system;
for on Thursday, July 18, 2002, at 12:43 , John Cowan wrote:
> People who actually care about this stuff relabel the BCE years by
> one:  1 BCE = 0, 2 BCE = -1, 3 BCE = -2, etc.  This is the convention of
> ISO 8601, the standard for designating Gregorian dates and times.
> (XML Schema implements this buggily, equating -1 with 1 BCE, and
> leaving out 0 altogether.)
To return to where I began:

On Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at 10:07 , Nik Taylor wrote:
{snip}
> The concept of zero as a number didn't exist in Europe in the middle
> ages.
Indeed not - nor, as I've observed, for the many millennia before the
Middle Ages either.  The concept of zero was apparently developed among
Hindu mathematicians of India.  Maybe we should credit their religion for
this
insight? (But it won't do to say something positive about religion, will
it?).
 From there it spread westward through the Muslim countries.  Oh dear,
surely
the Muslim clerics opposed the heretical zero and the infidel Hindu numeric
symbols!  Well, actually no.  The Hindu symbols were readily adopted with
the
concept zero; and mathematics flourished in Muslim centers.

Ah, so the Christians opposed zero and the new-fangled 'arabic' symbols
(the Hindu
symbols as they evolved in Muslim lands) because they were the work of the
wicked Saracens?  Well, again - sorry to disappoint - but no.  The Arabic
numerals in fact were eagerly taken up - and a variety of the western
arabic
numerals are still used by us today - together with the concept of zero,
the
word itself being derived from Arabic.

Religion had nowt to do with zero or the system of counting years, except
for
determining the 'turning point'.  But if a secular 'turning point' had been
chosen (as, e.g. in ancient Rome), there'd have still been no year 0.  IIRC
even when the French revolutionaries introduced their new calendar with
1789
as year 1, there was no year zero - and the revolutionaries of the time
were
certainly not bound by any religious scruples.

Indeed, to quote Nik again:
On Thursday, July 18, 2002, at 12:04 , Nik Taylor wrote:
{snip}
> .............  It has nothing to do with the religious origin.
> It's just like the older system of counting "The Xth year of the reign
> of Y".  There's no zeros in such a system.  What would the zeroth year
> of the reign of so-and-so mean?
AMEN!
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Sorry to have spun this out a bit, but I do find it irritating that on a
list that is supposed to be devoted to constructed languages, a few people
seem to use it as a platform to make snide comments about people's
religious
beliefs.  IMNSHO it is a misuse of the list.

I know it's fashionable to ridicule anyone who actually holds a religious,
political or other ideological belief and won't join the band of skeptics.
But ridicule is easy and cheap.

I know I'm old fashioned; but my schooling was in the 1950s when we were
brought
up to respect other peoples ideas and try to see the other person's point
of
view.  Weird, I guess - but to my simple mind the world would be a lot
happier
and safer if more people did just that.

Happily I have found more enlightened people on this list and have had
fruitful,
interesting private email correspondence with people of quite different
faiths
to mine.

Can we respect one another's beliefs and stick to conlanging, please?

Ray.

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