Re: Military time (whoops!)

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:
> For a completely different reason, namely that the Gregorian calendar has no
> year zero. You'll have to ask Pope Gregory the reason for that... Gregorians
> are the only ones who think that way. Scientists and clairvoyants don't.
> Neither do clockmakers.

Actually, the blame goes to a 6th-cent Scythian monk
named Dionysius Exiguus, who set the date of Christ's
birth at 752 AUC. Of course, Dionysius (whom we now
know to have been a tad short in his reckoning; sorry,
could NOT resist that pun) didn't know about zero.
Nobody in the West knew or had known: 753 BC was Annus
unus in the AUC reckoning; there was no zeroth
Olympiad; etc. (When was the concept introduced into
Europe? The OED gives 1399 for the for the first use of
the word cipher in English, 1604 for zero.) By the time
Pope Gregory tried to clean up the mess (1582; and lots
of countries wouldn't accept it: William of Orange
arrived in England _before_ he left the Low Countries,
because England was still on the Julian Calendar, while
the Netherlands had adopted the Gregorian), it was too
deeply ingrained for fixing. And we still count
administrations and other human events from 1: 1776 (or
1788) is the first year of this republic, no? not the
zeroth?
Interestingly, Hillaire Belloc always insisted the idea
of counting centuries from the year one (20th beginning
in 1901) was a nasty Protestant custom. Like the
Italians, he counted centuries from 00. I agree it's
much more logical, and think the simplest thing to do
is say that the first century was anomalous, having
only 99 years (1-99 AD), and all subsequent centuries
run from 100-199, 200-299, and so on.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx