Comments on: Numbering the Centuries

By: Micah

Micah — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 06:02:59 +0000

It gets more unwieldy in the future: “the two-thousand one hundreds”, etc. Mark’s system has a longer litefime in that respect.

By: Muninn

Muninn — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:28:27 +0000

Hehe, thanks for that Mark….reminds me a bit of programming….I always have trouble switching back and forth between programming languages in which Arrays start with 0 and those programming languages whose array counters start at 1. When you refer to Array item 20, you may be referring to the 21st item or the 20th item depending on which language you are programming in…

That is fine, I can handle the fact that there are different systems in different languages. However…what we currently have in history is worse….it would be like having a single programming language in which the array called Century item 20 (Century[20]) suddenly becomes 19 when you refer to the hundred items within a second array in it: Century[19][84] is the 84th entry of item 20. We have a 0 based array system, but which switches to a 1 based array system in the same language…

By: Muninn

Muninn — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:25:27 +0000

I would be happy to accept some shorter system, so that we can refer to them in fewer syllables (and, if one insists, use the word century) and the existing system does, as you say, allow a term to establish a connection between some period and the years it is related to.

However, I see no real need for it. If you are talking about the late 1600s, or the mid-1600s…the numbered shorthand is actually one more syllable to say and a fraction of a second more to mentally convert at some point.

What I dislike is the fact that dates with, for example, 16 in it clash in my head with something with 17 in it that it is supposed to equal…it is just irrational and unnecessary extra burden on my very bad memory. :-) If it is true that students also struggle with this – why bother? Why not just begin the process of phasing it out? Although we are still left with numbers, it might also marginally help reduce the sometimes not so subtle way that this artificial numbering of the centuries have created temporal categories in historical study.

Personally, I have serious doubts about any century, or near century, having really enough unity to merit the absurdities that you mention…If not, getting rid of the artificial unity that century terminology creates might have an additional benefit…

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:21:10 +0000

Hmmm…Well, if you want to be sophisticated about it, you could always preface any talk by saying you’ll be using a proprietary dating system for convenience, where the year 1 = year 0, and years 0-99 equals the 0th century, and then you can refer to the 1900s as the 19th century and leave your audience to figure out what you’re saying ;). Start referring to this as the muninn dating system and you may start a trend!

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 02:11:55 +0000

I like the century numbered shorthand, myself, and never really had a problem with it.

But my students, on the other hand, seem incapable of making sense of it, so now when I’m teaching (or otherwise talking), I’ll usually say “X century ([X-1]00s)” just about every time.

The advantage the century number has is that you can pull off such absurdities as “the long 19th century” or starting the “20th century” in 1914….