In reply to:
Any epochal dating system is arbitrary. A.H. is a good example of this. There was no year zero in the A.H. system either, but there was a year one. Taking as inevitable the artifice and arbitrary retrogression implicit in the creation of a starting point for a dating system, said system must still have a "year one." The alternative strikes me as similar to mandating the removal of the last carriage from all trains - if there is no year one, then there can be no year two, etc. I am quite happy to accept vox populi, vox dei, although you are as selective in accepting that as any of us. All of us here have points on which we say "the people have spoken", and other points on which we say "the people are wrong". I don't make a fuss about the millennium, except in jest. I do believe that there was a starting point to the dating system currently in use. It matters not when that start was, it matters only that there was a start.
Well, here's my
[reiterant]
If any dating system is arbitrary, and we therefore accept that we, post hoc, assign a 'start' date, then it seems obvious to me that there is no problem in decreeing a start with a zero in it. The year zero is simply the year before the year one. It isn't as if the Romans are going to complain that Julius Caesar has suddenly invaded Britian in 42BCE instead of 43BCE, or whatever. Most history books, in any case, cannot be that accurate about years going further back than 100BCE. It's a small enough change to avoid the aesthetic ugliness of ending a century a year after the the numbers themselves have ticked over.[/reiterant]
I suppose we could justify all these arguments here on the grounds that it is about using the language, but I suspect that might be a piece of sophistry...
