this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
96 points (92.9% liked)
Asklemmy
42502 readers
1435 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
ELI5 answer?
In the conventional calendar, there wasn’t a year zero and it wasn’t skipped. Zero is the moment in time that we use to begin counting time.
Think of an elementary school style number line:
…-3_-2_-1_0_1_2_3…Each number is one year apart. This makes the numbers measure something like Age. If you are 3 years old, you can count 3 years between 0 and 3.But a year is not an Age. It is the span of time between ages, and the years we name are actually the spaces between the numbers on the number line. So the first year (1 AD/CE) is the first space after zero (between 0 and 1), and the first negative year (1 BC/BCE) is the first space before the 0 (between -1 and 0).
Then there is the astronomical calendar, which does have a year zero. They get this by naming the year (the space on the number line) after the number to the right side of the space on the number line.
By this description, year zero is the time between the 0 and the 1 for the same reason the time between 10 and 11 is the year 10.
Your logic is correct, but you are off by 1.
0-1 is year 1
10-11 is year 11