Re: Yes, I'm back

In a message dated 1/20/2003 6:23:23 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
christophe.grandsire@FREE.FR writes:


> En réponse à Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:
> 
> >         No, nothing interesting happened in the year 0 AD. In fact,
> > positively
> > nothing happened in that year, since there never was such a year.[*] 1
> > BC
> > rolls over to 1 AD. And no, to forstall the next obvious question,
> > nothing
> > particularly note-worthy happened in either of those years, either. (I
> > now
> > await some historian buff to correct me. :) This is why purists argue
> > that
> > 2001, not 2000, was the start of the third millenium.
> 
> Yep. When the calendar was devised, there was no concept of zero in Europe 
> yet,
> and anyway years were counted using *ordinal* numbers, which start at 
> "first".
> If you think of "1 BC" and "1 AD" as "first year Before Christ" and "first 
> year
> Anno Domini" (with the birth of Christ always taken as starting point), it
> becomes obvious that there can be no 0th year in between.
> 
> >         We have to thank a monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus (aka
> > Dennis the
> > Little), who had the task of figuring out the Easter cycles . . . 
 Now can you see why I referred to the (original) equivalent of Kankonia's 
7215 as "the birth of Christ"? You try to talk about the transition any other 
way and you get the list flooded with long conversations and dissertations 
about when the calendar switched over and why there's no year 0 and how and 
when the millennium began and how astronomers should best subtract dates and 
things that fill up the daily quota on a list that could best be used for 
talking about other things. Is it really any surprise that the list went over 
100 yesterday? 

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