Date format: BCE vs. BC

The wiki page and the help text both point to the use of BCE. Here's my case against.

Whever possible we should go toward the most common designation. By doing this we accomplish three things:

1. We reduce the amount of "thinking" required to enter data. Most users don't read directions, so if we can follow their natural inclination, we're in good shape.
2. We make ourselves understood by the most people.
3. We minimize the amount of political/religious/ideological "point scoring."

By all three criteria, BC is better than BCE. The fact is, the vast majority of people don't know what BCE is. I know. I used to TA ancient history classes, and I found myself explaining it a lot--and this was to college students at a (the?) top state school.

I'm particularly adamant about point 3. LibraryThing Common Knowledge isn't here to save the world. It isn't there to convince anyone of anything. While BCE and CE are about treating everyone fairly, by veering away from common practice they make a statement. If we're going to start making statements, there's no end to it. Gender? Nationality? Place names? Everything is contested if the very format scores points.

Agree? Disagree?

Disagree, but with your argument more than your position.

I think the main priority should be what's better, not what's easier. Obviously "better" is subjective, and I don't have a strong preference myself. But on matters like this I would go with the prevailing view among academics, not among the general public. If you pick up the latest edition of an ancient history journal, do they use BCE or BC? (I don't know; I don't pay close attention to things like that.)

As I see it, "better" is a judgment call. More common is not. That's one reason Wikipedia uses the most common name for something, not the best. Another is a strong bias toward maximum accessibility.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions>

Two quotes:

"Names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists."

"The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more. In particular, the current title of a page does not imply either a preference for that title name, nor that any alternative name is discouraged in the text of articles. ... An inconclusive list of controversial names includes: Roman Catholic Church vs. Catholic Church; BC/AD vs. BCE/CE; Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia vs. Republic of Macedonia vs. Macedonia; Palestinian Arabs vs. Palestinians vs. Palestinian People. There are many others."

To your question, I think it varies. A test of the Bryn Mawr Classical review reveals 3/1 in favor of BC.

*http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=site:ccat.sas.upenn....*http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=site%3Acca...

I think this is a different context than Wikipedia, though. Wikipedia tends to be the source that people turn to when they want quick information about a subject without reading a book on it; if you're looking at a book about something, you don't need it dumbed down.

Maximum accessibility is fine for Wikipedia, but I'd prefer a more scholarly approach to books.

It looks like this may not be relevant in the case of BC/BCE anyway, but just in principal, I don't think majority rule is always the way to go. If you were going with the majority, all dates would be in American format and lots of people would be very confused and unhappy.

I know this isn't very helpful for your actual question, but I think it's still worth saying.

I have to admit to being the one that wrote the BCE blurb. This is mainly because of my background in dealing with archaeological data. It's /currently/ the most widely used among scholars, but this is relatively recent and I still use BC and BCE interchangeably in normal conversations (if can you call conversations that frequently use BCE and BC normal?). From a current academic perspective I would go with BCE. But the syntax is certainly NOT something I'm invested in.

But, as with any religious argument, there will be people on both sides that are adamant that they are correct and simply will not use the other variant. In the end, they both mean the same thing to me so I don't care. We (as in LTers) may just have to agree not to agree on the BC/BCE issue and not have a rule at all.
Thoughts?

Well, Chicago doesn't care either way, and they are my bible...

However, personally, I hate BC and it seems odd to me that something as contemporary as LT would want to use something as dated (to me) as BC. I don't know why Zoe mentions ancient history journals, they hardly have a monopoly on the past, and some disciplines prefer BC while some prefer BCE. I just find it makes more of a political/religious/ideological statement to go with the religious term. Especially when all the dates I've seen so far say BCE.

How can something be dated when it's the undisputed leader in common usage? Doesn't dated have to touch reality at some point, or does it float free and above, scorning the present as dated?

Google stats:

"100 BC" - 434,000; "100 BCE" - 56,200
"200 BC" - 437,000; "200 BCE" - 82,600
"300 BC" - 470,000; "300 BCE" - 67,700
"323 BC" - 267,000; "323 BCE" - 27,200 (death of Alexander the Great)
"387 BC" - 22,900; "387 BCE" - 1,130 (sack of Rome)

Here's my exception that proves the rule. BCE and CE has been particularly embraced by Jewish scholars, and for understandable reasons. But take a look at the same stats, only searching .il (Israeli) domains:

"100 BC" - 133; "100 BCE" - 130
"200 BC" - 94; "122 BCE" - 122
"300 BC" - 98; "300 BCE" - 43
"323 BC" - 82; "323 BCE" - 55 (death of Alexander the Great)
"387 BC" - 5; "387 BCE" - 0 (sack of Rome)

It's much closer, but BC still has the edge.

As for religious terms, I'm very comfortable with adding AH dates. They make perfect sense because they're what Islamic History runs on. In some sense it's unfair that we date the Battle of Kadisiya as A.D. 635-637/A.H. 14-15 and not by the Zoroastrian calendar of the losers. But the Zoroastrian date would help nobody today, except to push an opinion.

While BC might strictly only make "religious" sense for ancient history directly relating to pre-Christian origins, it's what modern civilization runs on. Until that changes, I don't think systems about searching and ready comprehension should stray. The role of cataloging is not to promote opinions.

Incidentally, I'd bet archaeology is somewhat ahead of classis and history, as the BMCR example showed.

Pre-historic archaeology is also fond of using BP, before present. Only works with large numbers, of course, or we're in dating funhouse land. I'm not sure there's a single author we could use BP with. The Lascaux artists don't show up as authors. Oh, there's always God*.

*I just flipped God back to the telescope image. The "19th Century Liturgical Book" was just begging for a fight.

I learned many years ago in Hebrew school to use BCE and not BC! :-)

Yeah, but you don't date your checks BCE do you!

(Does a little victory dance.)

I can think of a lot of words in common usage (and with plenty high google stats) whose use in a contemporary, moderately serious context would seem dated and inappropriate. "Miss" vs. "Ms.", for an example that's not too offensive.

Has understanding BCE actually been a problem up to now? I can see people wondering for a minute about CE, which is totally different from AD, but BCE is so close to BC that I've never known anyone to actually get confused about what it meant.

Ms. Smith - 804,000
Miss Smith - 204,000

And that's including "miss" as a verb. (I tried "miss Spalding" and got a lot of "I miss Spalding Gray." I do too.)

As for people getting confused, I think you're wrong. If my experience teaching told me anything it's that tiny things throw people. People get thrown by line numbers or verse numbers, variation between -os and -us in Greek names, etc. As for "Aischylos" and his ilk, it's not a majority practice, and I don't think it's gaining anymore.

Well, whatever. Clearly there are like, two of us with strong feelings about this and it is probably mostly irrational on my part. But I will just quote Zoe: "I don't think majority rule is always the way to go." This really feels like lowest-common-denominat-ing.

Devil's Advocate (and I mean big "D" Devil here):
If we had the internet in 1960 and you had Googled for a particularly offensive "N" word then you would be certain that we should use that term because it was the most common google return? That's kind of like saying, well if everybody jumps off the bridge....
It doesn't make it right that it is the most common, it just makes it...well....commonly wrong. heh. :)

Again, I really don't care which one we use, or both.

This is a fun game. Tim and I do this quite often. He usually wins...but then again, he sends me paychecks, so I let him win. :)

I think that might be a special case of Godwin's law.

But, yes, I don't think library catalogs should have been ahead of the curve on "negro." Making things hard to find in order to score points is exactly the sort of voodoo ontology cataloging shouldn't be involved in. You encourage librarians to inject their voodoo preferences into cataloging and you get monsters as often as mermaids.

I never said anything about Hitler.
Damn. You got me. Now I have.

I like AD but BCE myself. A little of each.

ConceptDawg, that is the EXACT example I was thinking of but I figured someone would freak if I compared a religious phrase to a racial slur. So I had to come up with a lame alternative.

Unfortunately, after having slept on it I still think I am right. You have Option A, a phrase designed to be explicitly religious, and Option B, a phrase designed to be neutral. But you think using Option B would be making the religious statement! BCE isn't that new anymore.

PS--Mrs Smith: over 2 million. Ms. includes both.

While BCE and CE are about treating everyone fairly, by veering away from common practice they make a statement.

And if that statement is "We're interested in treating everyone fairly, and maintaining a neutral point of view," I don't see what's wrong with that.

BCE is not the most common term, but it's never going to become the most common usage if people don't, y'know, *use* it.

> 10

Of course she doesn't! We're CE now. In any case, does anyone put, "October 18, 2007 AD" on their checks?

Personally, I don't care.

Personally, I care a lot.

I am restraining myself (violently) from my canned rant on the Christian religious assumptions underlying Western culture (you may breathe a prayer of thanks to the Deity of your choice).

As a non-Christian religious minority, I chafe under the AD/BC. For folks like me, this is as loaded an issue as the gender discussion (which I just realized I don't know/don't remember how to code as a hyperlink). http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=21657

There is a religion-neutral alternative, and as #19 expressed, it will never become common usage if it is not commonly used.

Maybe you could spell them out, and let people choose between "Before Christ" and "Before the Common Era."

Or maybe you could do a little translation, and make it BAO = "Before the Anointed One." Or BM = "Before the Messiah." That last one should go down a treat with Jewish users still waiting for the Messiah, but be favored by any anal retentive members.

But by all means, let's not use anything with a religious connotation, like "common era." :-)

Well we could recalculate all dates to ALT and BLT

Before Library Thing
After Library Thing

That's what's really important right?

;)

19: And if that statement is "We're interested in treating everyone fairly, and maintaining a neutral point of view," I don't see what's wrong with that.

Well said.

21. I am restraining myself (violently) from my canned rant on the Christian religious assumptions underlying...

You ain't the only one. Which is why I felt I ought to note I may have been feeling irrational on this last night. Why not just ban all dates before 4,000 BC while we're at it in case people get confused about the age of the earth...

Howabout bACRP*

before Arbitary Calender Reference Point

or bTZ

before Time Zero.

but why re-invent the wheel, BCE works fine, and those of us who care can go around "correcting" the entries from the vast numbers of LTers who don't read these discussions and enter things as they think fit.

* Yes I know it's tempting to alter the order. but Calender Arbitary Refernce Point doesn't read so well, and people might be offended

And I had just been so pleased/relieved yesterday when I saw that Chris's rules had BCE in them (on the CK Wikithing Rules page)...

>21 PhaedraB, as a member of a "non-Christian religious minority" myself (though I think a different one, guessing from your profile), I completely and utterly agree.

We are (in North America and Western Europe, at least) entirely enmeshed in a cultural landscape that presumes Christianity as the norm and everyone else as "other". The term "Common Era" recognizes the fact that western cultures are Christian-centred, but that there are other options. I personally will not write AD after a year -- it's not the year of my lord, thank you very much -- and BC isn't much better.

I must say it reminds me of the boyfriend I had in college who couldn't understand why Jews and Muslims (the only religious minorities of which he knew members at the time) didn't want to put up Xmas decorations in their dorm rooms... Or the big debate about whether black students had the "right" to be upset when some Southern white students hung a Dixie flag outside their dorm window -- (sarcasm) after all, isn't it just a historical symbol... (/sarcasm). Yes Tim, it's pretty inflammatory to some of us.

I vote BCE. It may not be the most common now, but it will be.

I vote BCE/CE too.

I dimly recall that BC isn't even (provably) correct in regard to its own point of reference--Jesus may have been already four in 0 BC.

Then there's the question of WHEN Jesus became Christ...

I vote BCE and CE for a lot of reasons, but here's one that hasn't been mentioned: "BC" and "AD" cannot be accurately referenced to their named historical events, and the two terms are not complementary to each other. It always annoyed me even when I was a kid exposed to neither academia nor archaeological dating. (Oops - I was writing this before I saw #29 posted, which beat me to the punch.)

But why can't there be redirects or some programming fix as needed to handle BC/AD?

Frankly I don't think the "politically correct" argument washes. Based on watching the debates & arguments over the last decades, I think it's actually more accurate to describe the current furor(s) about dating as a concerted attempt to maintain a Christianized language and culture. A "religiously correct" backlash, if you will, against growth in the use of BCE/CE. The shift in usage toward BCE/CE hasn't been forced; it's been adopted by people who see it as a better solution for the obvious reasons. The political Christianity movement of the last decades has sought for cultural issues to "make a stand on", retroactively characterizing all sorts of things ("happy holidays", "BCE/CE") as political correctness. It's tedious and diminishes whatever merit there ever was in the "political correct" complaint to begin with.

Let's just remove the issue and use ab urbe condita. :-) Maybe Chris, could write a bit of code to do a conversion upon entry.

Voting eh? I vote B.C./A.D.

I hate BCE and CE and refuse to use them.

As stated by me on the 18th day of Октябрь in the year of our salvation (or "in the year of our lord") 2007 (Anno Domini; Anno Salutis or Anno Nostrae Salutis).

31> So, we are in 2760 A.U.C. (ab urbe condita)?

33> Yep, we are.

Sorry, I disagree with BCE. I'm irreligious, and even I think this is political correctness gone amok. The Google argument is dispositive for me: most people know BC/AD. To go BCE is to impose a superfluous mental 'step' for everyone else. If it comes to that, the entire dating structure of the Western world is steeped with religious significance - the seven day week, the Gregorian calendar, the names of months and days, etc. Should we adopt a contra-conventional dating system just because?

Since there's no substantive difference between BC and BCE, and since dating is about convention, the most common usage argument wins.

As for political Christianity, that's just a non sequitur, and goes to Spalding's point 3. One could just as easily make the point that, long before "political Christianity" sought for cultural issues to "make a stand on", the anti-clerical French were at it with their 10 hour days, 10 day weeks, decimal time, and the so called revolutionary calendar. And we know how that turned out.

Fairly uninterested in the debate, but a standard is needed. I'm afraid I'm a prescriptionist, and think that conformity should be forced on the data to provide maximum utility in extracting meaningful statistics or linkages.

I'd hesitate to use Wikipedia as a guide to what to do in a case such as this. 'Community consensus' is a pretty poor way to arrive at a solution that is both workable in the practical world and 'correct' in both academic and technological terms.

What does the library world use for cataloguing? If there is no definitive guidance from the academic community, and if distinguishing between BC and BCE is trivial for database processing, then there are two options still open: choice imposed from above, or an assessment of the likely preference of the community at which the site is aimed.

Seems to me that a poll of the people that are active in these discussions in this group will disenfranchise the vast majority of users of LT. I think there is only one reasonable option: Tim should decide on the basis of what his target audience for this tool is, both in terms of future internationalisation and what the 'common Thingamabrarian' is likely to do. I think his arguments in the OP and all his subsequent posts are not logical, apart from point 2 in the OP, but it strikes me that that is the most powerful argument of all.

36: That is likely going to be the final outcome from this discussion (an executive decision on the matter). I've said before that I personally don't really care either way. I use both forms interchangeably in regular speech but use only BCE in academic papers and presentations (art history and archaeology). I do think that BCE will, over time, become the academic standard, but that's not yet the case today.

I have no problem with people using whatever form they feel more comfortable with.

Should we adopt a contra-conventional dating system just because?

We already did - the ISO standard date format. This imposes a "superfluous mental step" for nearly everyone, and yet was settled on because it made a lot of logical sense. BCE/CE is part of the same ISO standard 8601.

Wow! nperrin, with some ISO smack. Well played.

Well no, for the ISO standard date format, it wasn't "just because". There was a good reason for it: to avoid confusion between American-style dating and British-style dating (which is used in much of the Anglophone world and in Commonwealth countries).

As far as the two different standards are concerned, there is a substantial and not-insignificant demographic for both conventions. The same cannot be said for 'BCE' (BC is by far the more common usage).

Further, American and British-style dating have substantive differences - when the ordering is switched, the date in one convention means something completely different in the other convention. By contrast, there is no meaningful difference between BC and BCE, except that one is more recognizable than the other. So there's no reason to buckle convention in the latter case.

I agree. That was well played. I knew there were even more reasons to avoid letting some committee decide things.

Of course she doesn't! We're CE now. In any case, does anyone put, "October 18, 2007 AD" on their checks?

Yes, I was joking!

I dimly recall that BC isn't even (provably) correct in regard to its own point of reference--Jesus may have been already four in 0 BC.

One quibble. There was no 0. It goes from 1 to 1.

Incidentally, the AD/BC thing took a while to happen. It was cooked up by Dionysius the Short in the 6c. The date of Jesus' birth is in fact somewhat vexed, but he had his opinion and that's all it is.

Sorry, I disagree with BCE. I'm irreligious, and even I think this is political correctness gone amok. The Google argument is dispositive for me: most people know BC/AD. To go BCE is to impose a superfluous mental 'step' for everyone else. If it comes to that, the entire dating structure of the Western world is steeped with religious significance - the seven day week, the Gregorian calendar, the names of months and days, etc.

A good point. You don't get away from the problem unless you renumber and rename everything. Worse, the underlying system is not Christian or even Judeo-Christian but hostage to the dreaed numerican proclivities of the Sumerians!

Some data. I've already given the Google data—both generally and even for sites within Israel, showing that BC/AD is clearly the most common usage. Here's Google books, going publication year by year, using 323 BC, Alexander the Great's death.

These are the raw numbers.



Here is the ratio, just going 1990-2007. As you can see BCE gained a lot of quickly. The high-water mark was 1999, when BC was only 2.1 times more popular. Last year it was 4.5 times as popular.



Note that 323 BC tends to come up more in academic contexts than not, so this skews. Even so, BC is dominant, and the trend is moving, if anything, away from BCE.

Just took a look in The Timetables of History and found ... a compromise!

The book shows Alexander dying in -323. Why not let people enter either BC or BCE, and have the program convert it to -? I'd think that it might also make it easier to list dates in the correct order.

That is a nice compromise. Thoughts?

>43, 44

I think that's a nifty idea.

If negative dates are chosen as the "way" to it then I'll probably change the hint text to reflect that. But I'll still allow BC/BCE and just do the conversion on entry. People should get the idea rather quickly and even if they don't it shouldn't be a big deal.

I think negatives would be pretty cool :) But probably the most confusing by far.... especially because of potential confusion with dashes (like if a book was said to have been written from -823 to -822, what then?)

ah...good point. And why we have these conversations in the first place.

Just another non-believer who prefers BC/AD.

47: Well, that's why we have hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes...

50: and you thought explaining pipes was fun? :) Try explaining those to your average person.

nperrin, you expect everyone to be able to understand the difference between and correctly use hyphens vs. dashes when there are people who can't even figure out that there may be multiple authors who share a surname? Yeah, right. (Sorry, I think the negative sign for dates is a lovely idea but unworkable for exactly that reason.)

Personally I prefer BCE/CE but I'm a giant nerd.

Oh dear, the dreaded BC/BCE argument.

I ran away from Wikipedia for a long time over that. The articles about Aeschylus and Sophocles had their dates in BC, while Euripides one had BCE dates, so I among my other edits I changed those to BC so it'd fit nicely with the others. And all I got for my troubles was a Wikipedia administrator reverting all my edits just because he didn't agree with me changing the dates. He was a real arsehole about it, and to this day I don't know why he was so obsessed about doing it with Euripides but not the others. Maybe they're standardised now, I haven't looked.

*breathes*

But I digress. I vote for BC on the grounds that it's common usage. I wager most people don't even realise that the initial have religious origins. And, confusingly enough BCE, a supposedly netural term, *does* have religion origins in my view, because people choosing to use that are explicitly stating that they do not disagree with a common concept because of its origins in Christian religion.

I'm an athiest, so I don't think Christianity is great or anything of the sort. But I don't think that's a good reason to object to everything that might have come from it. Hell, even books owe a lot to religion! What with all those monks carefully crafting and writing books by hand (even if they did cut up and erase original Greek parchments for use as writing material sometimes) keeping the written word alive through the Dark Ages.

In short (if I can say that now), agitating for the use of BCE seems rather like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me.

First of all, we don't currently have any field that calls for a range of dates. I was suggesting dashes because the only conceivable use I could think of with our current data would be birth through death, which would be something machine-generated - it wouldn't matter if people didn't type an en-dash on their own, they wouldn't have to, but it would show up in a less ambiguous way. But I can't believe no one noticed that in Kira's post she got around this problem just fine by using the words "from" and "to." Jeez. I don't expect anyone to use anything according to a standard when it comes to writing. That's why copyeditors like myself have jobs.

I wager most people don't even realise that the initial have religious origins.

Maybe we should spell it out then, like with the state abbreviations, since most people didn't know what they were supposed to stand for either.

Maybe we should spell it out then, like with the state abbreviations, since most people didn't know what they were supposed to stand for either.

The situations are not analagous. In order to make sense of the state abbreviations, people need to know what they mean. With BC, people don't need to know what the letters mean in order to make sense of it. They could stand for "Burnt Cakes", "Biffy Clyro" or "Boogaloo Crew", for all that someone will care if you tell them such-and-such an event happened in 357 BC.

>54 For sure, all problems can be overcome, but often the best route has the fewest problems. I fully understand the different dashes, but it's not helpful if you can't make them with ease on a standard keyboard. I can do it right in Word with great effort, and only then because it auto-corrects. There's no way it would be practical to have to distinguish between them every time you entered data into LT.

Er ... just to go back a little ... I didn't suggest that people enter it that way. I suggested that LT might convert BC and BCE entries to a minus sign.

I dunno. I'm accustomed to using genealogy software which doesn't give a damn how I enter a date. It will convert whatever I put to one of the date formats (which include "bet 1810-1820" or "c. 1815") allowed by the program --- either the default, or one I've selected. If my entry can't be converted, or if I put June 31, I'll get an error message. Idiot-proof, not idiot-friendly. Works for me. :-)

Well, I prefer BCE and CE, largely because AD really irks me (the year of our lord -- whose lord? -- not mine!). Philosophically, though, I don't really like BCE and CE that much because I don't see why the so-called Common era should be identical with the BC/AD time frame, but I bow to convenience and tradition.

Edited to fix grammatical error.

I'd vote for not having a standard. I'd rather let people who only know BC/AD use that, and let people who prefer BCE/CE use that. It's not really going to be all that mysterious, and it means people don't have to conform to a standard that they find personally offensive. But there would still need to be a rule, like on Wikipedia, that you can't just go switching other people's BCs to BCEs or vice-versa.

ISO/astronomical time, where for example the year 31 BCE is represented as -30 (because of the "year 0" issue), is too likely to confuse, I think.

I generally prefer the BC/AD dating system.

I have no objections to using a secular dating system, but using a system that removes Christ from the names of its eras but still dates from His supposed birth date just strikes me as kind of silly.

I second #59 in not having a standard.

Is it really necessary to pick one? Other than the possibility of zealots on both sides changing them back and forth they mean exactly the same thing when it comes to the important part: the number.

While I prefer the AD/BC (only the shiny/nifty new ideas pull me away from "traditional" usages), I'll use either one depending on my audience. I also thought to mention negative numbers yesterday, but the lack of year 0 makes the number line all wonky.

You could even work around the zealots who want to change all of the ADs or BCEs. If CK stored dates as dates, rather than as text fields, then it could display the dates in any reasonable format. The default could be to display dates as entered. But if LT notices that a particular user has entered a lot of dates in a particular format, it could automatically start displaying all dates in that format for that user.

I'm not sure if that's clever or scary. In any event, it doesn't seem worth the programming effort.

62: Both clever and scary. And you are correct that it probably isn't worth the programming effort in this case.

I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this issue. People may put in BC or BCE and I'll figure out what to do with them. I may convert them to +/- in the database. I may leave them as is. I may convert them all to BCE. I may do the opposite. I may even start using BLT and ALT.

I believe that more discussion (enlightening as it has been) is probably not going to get us anywhere.

Would it be possible to convert them all to one format in the database, but then let us choose how we want to display them?

Ya'know, that would be a good idea. At least, it seems like one to me.

We lead sheltered lives over on the Eastern side of the Atlantic. I stumbled upon this discussion by mistake and became fascinated. What on earth was everyone on about? and such an amount of heat generated! A parallel universe? Bernard Shaw (or maybe Wilde) was right. It wasn't until Message 22 that I became certain what it was all about.

I cannot recall more than a couple of instances when I have met this usage (BCE) and in each case the context made it perfectly clear what was going on. Like it or not we (in Europe) live in a largely Christian civilisation with Christian-based education, history and values. To speak or write 'BC' is understood by everyone and in any case is simply a signifier; it is not an affirmation of Faith.

In the interests of easy communication, please let us stick with the terms BC and AD and let the politically correct brigade nurse their prejudices by themselves.

#66, well, I would put it that hard: "please let us stick with the terms BC and AD and let the politically correct brigade nurse their prejudices by themselves."

But there is indeed a cultural difference here between the sides of the pond. And a language difference just adds to it.
Were you to introduce CE/BCE, we would have to translate it into the different languages. This would give "u.Z./v.u.Z." in German. Now THERE you have a problem: u.Z./v.u.Z. will be recognised by *almost no-one* in the German speaking countries. Google.de gives the following numbers:

387 v.Chr.: 674 hits (sack of Rome)
387 v. u. Z. : no hits

50 v. Chr.: 30.200 hits (a more generic date)
50 v. u. Z.: 52 hits (Jewish, Jehova's Witness, University of Hamburg and a gamer websites)

The only place I have seen it used is the Jewish weekly newspaper here (which has a circulation of maybe 30.000). Maybe add to that the circulation of the new "Islamische Zeitung" (with comparable numbers). Compare that to 100 Mio German speakers. Common man just never has come across the term here. I only know because I read the Jewish newspaper on and off and peeked at the islamic one.

Right now I'm checking for both and each gets cross-searched when you click on a date with either variation.

Why would a Common Era begin 2007 years ago? Renaming the years seems pretty gimmicky to me. I say either start a new calendar a la revolutionary France, or deal with it. Also, let's get rid of Thursday. I really hate Thor.

I strongly disagree. Even the major popular reference works (except perhaps the most reactionary ones) published by Christians about Christianity now use the less exclusive designations BCE and CE. Examples of such works are The Oxford Companion to the Bible (edited by Bruce Metzger, who frequently promoted his Christian views, including the physical resurrection of Christ); The Oxford Bible Commentary (edited by two very traditional Oxford scholars who were mainline Protestants); leaving out of account, of course, many recently published books for a general audience on non-religious topics.

BC and AD are relics of a time when unabashed Christian cultural dominance was taken for granted. Thus, with regard to your third point, the statement is more in retaining these anachronistic and prejudicial labels than in changing them (notice that, of course, BCE and CE still date history in Christian terms, and are only a slight improvement) at a time when diversity of thought and belief are widely recognized and even valued. I do not understand your mention of gender-inclusive terms, since few people now continue to write "he / him" when the statement could apply to a female as well as to a male; use of BC and AD are relevantly analogous to that, and should likewise be changed.

As for your second point about averting confusion: my experience is different from yours. I, too, was a teacher for years, at both the university and secondary levels, and I had not only university classes but also young secondary school classes understand and use the replacement of the historical labels with little to no effort; indeed, many students were already familiar with their use. If many people on LibraryThing will have trouble with this usage, then it will be a good convention with which to become familiar.

#41

I dimly recall that BC isn't even (provably) correct in regard to its own point of reference--Jesus may have been already four in 0 BC.

One quibble. There was no 0. It goes from 1 to 1.

Wait until the people who got upset about the 10 days "lost" under the Gregorian calendar get ahold of this one! "We've lost a whole year!"

;-)

Well, I prefer BCE and CE, largely because AD really irks me (the year of our lord -- whose lord? -- not mine!).

Not mine, either, but that's a stupid argument. Does the fact that Wednesday is named after Odin bother you, too? I say either stick with AD/BC or start a new calendar with day 0 on 2000-03-01, and rename all the days of the week to boot :)

>72, nonsense. We all know that time started on 1-1-1970.

>73 at midnight UTC, mind. And the world ends on my wedding anniversary in 2038 - ominous!!

>73 That's nothing but a relic of a time when unabashed Unix cultural dominance was taken for granted. Down with cultural dominance!
2000-03-01 isn't prejudiced for or against any religion, either of gods, operating systems, or text editors (even though Emacs is obviously the only one worthy of the name)...date calculations will be easier, and months named after Latin numbers will line up with the calendar again (e.g., October will be the eighth month rather than the tenth...assuming we keep the old month names, of course; maybe being derived from Latin is too Euro-centric and un-PC)

#70

Criels, I agree completely.

Happy 12 Germinal, An 216

>75

Emacs is the only one worthy of the name "operating system, or text editor" - I agree.

Also, months will be renamed oneurary, twourary, threeuarary and so on.

(..and I'd like to gently point people back at post 68 in this thread.)

Vi for victory!

I have to have my tuppence worth - woops, sorry tuppence is a relic of Sterling currency (Pounds, shillings & pence) that Australia replaced with Decimal currency in 1966. We also replaced the traditional system of Weight & Measures with the Metric System. I remember as a kid never knowing if there were 14 or 16 ounces in a pound and 16 or 14 pounds in a stone. Life is so easy now.
Tell me, was it true that a US space rocket crashed because of a mix-up between metric & traditional measures? Maybe it was pro or anti metric propaganda.
But back to BCE vs BC.
I'll just say that whatever reason the ISO had for standardising on BCE/CE, it will not reverse its decision. Institutions will gradually adopt it & they won't revert. The sooner LT members adopt it the less confusing it will be for future generations.
So what's next? Well the sooner Military / 24 hour time is adopted the simpler life will be. 'am' and 'pm' are 2 latin abbreviations that should go the way of 'anno domini'. Australia, Albania, the US & Zimbabwe are some of the last nations to adopt this very sensible ISO standard.
Then there is the very sensible World Calendar that Christians, Jews & Muslims all object to. Look it up in Wikipedia. It'll be a while before that is adopted.
Lastly the most important change would be a simplified spelling system for English. It would make it so much easier to learn for children & non-English speakers & make reading & correct spelling easier. Where is the next Mr. Webster?

I prefer BCE/CE, because I've been using those for decades - but I'll survive if it goes the other way.

(But don't expect me to adjust to Miles for distances, Fahrenheit for teperatures, etc.)

Added: But why revive such an old thread?

BC is simpler, you only need to go to 4000.

If we pick most common we all need to change to Chinese dating.

BP (before present) is a fuzzy number normally expressed in a range and, in fact, if I recall correctly, "Present" is 1950.

It is all a bunch of ho ha but I would vote BCE/CE if this were a democracy which it is not.

Luckily we have fancy computers so we don't have to make these decisions. THe system handles both ways and converts between them. We sometimes say that certain topics (UI styles, coding styles, etc.) are "religious" debates, meaning that we'll never get a consensus. Well, this one really IS a religious debate at heart so we certainly will never get a consensus.

I love that this is resurfacing. However, I'm still quite convinced that the best designation is the one with the least potential for misunderstanding. It remains true that most people--even most readers--do not know what BCE means, and CE is even less understood. LibraryThing, like Wikipedia, should aim to use common designations.

Further, as I showed above--with the Bryn Mawr Classical Review--scholars are hardly all in the BCE/CE camp. In that case they are 3/1 against it. It's my impression, in fact, that the most persistent users of BCE/CE are actually the Religious Studies people. They are more sensitive to it, perhaps. But I think the sensitivity is telling--they're making a point about tolerance; the rest of the scholarly world just uses the common designation. And the non-scholarly world looks at BCE and wonders "is that a misprint?"

I don't actually advocate for changing BCE to BC, or whatever. Both work in the system. Let's let people call it what they want. But let's not go the other direction and run around telling members to change AD to CE.

Last, we should not avoid adding other appropriate systems, as necessary. We can do multiple dates in CK. Muslim authors should, I think, have AH dates added on--a different starting point and a different new-year. That's what scholars in Islamic studies do. Ditto the X/Y dates of Greek history, as necessary. If any author wrote in geologic time, we can use BP too.

There's some question here about whether sorting on the Date field works with BC/BCE, etc.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/109028

I think you can only sort the publication date field. Not likely to contain BC(E) dates very often. (I would absolutely love to see a possibility for sorting on "original date", but since we're not there yet...)

87> Check out the other thread. The user has some BC/E dates in the Date field.

> 88: Because he's "abusing" it to list original publication dates. Or at least, somehow I doubt he has a Penguin Herodotus from 401 BCE. :-) Not that I mind, but you can't blame LT for not supporting a field to do things it wasn't designed for.

87,88>

Well, the field is intended to be used, as it clearly states, to be used for the date of the edition. I don't think it's reasonable for users to complain when using something in a way it's not intended to be doesn't produce perfect results. I think making CK:OPD sortable (on the earliest date, or the first one entered, or something) would be a better option.

Agreed (earliest date preferably).

90> Fair point. Though it would be a bit of an impediment to actually getting a library that DOES have these things to list on LTFL. :D

Yes. Not many of them around, but if - for example - the British Museum would want to list its papyrus collection here there could be a problem.

Well, that's it; we're losing the British Museum to Goodreads!

Because he's "abusing" it to list original publication dates. Or at least, somehow I doubt he has a Penguin Herodotus from 401 BCE. :-) Not that I mind, but you can't blame LT for not supporting a field to do things it wasn't designed for.

Even if we did it, however, we'd need to support "4c BC" and variations. For that matter, very few dates from Greek history aren't in the form X/Y. The New Year was different.

Depending on culture, every calender would be very different. The Mesopotamians (mostly) went by a lunar calender. The Egyptians sort of had a lunar calender, but only because they inserted 5 "leap days" each year. Etc.

In short, it would be a nightmare.

96> Well, I suppose that means CK:OPD will never get sorted properly. Shame.

Of course, you COULD keep the baby and leave the bathwater and just support (0-9)+ BC/BCE. And ignore "c" in front. At least, for Date.

Oh, I don't think that many people will be listing their books by either ancient Egyptian or ancient Mesopotamian calenders.

Yes, I would absolutely LOVE CK:OPD to be sortable. And as long as we would only be entering dates (with a "-" sign when applicable) it wouldn't matter for sorting which calender you use. Comparing with another user might get tricky though. It's the synchronizing between calenders that's a problem, but as long as you're consistent within your own library...

I know you know this, BarkingMatt, and it's just a thinko, but it's impossible to be "consistent within your own catalog" with Common Knowledge data like CK:OPD.

I've used BCE for decades, and manage not to have to use either CE or AD for anything.

Help! My head is about to explode.

At first I wondered if LT could handle Roman Numerals. Then I thought that those lucky Romans never had to worry about negative numbers. Anyway the birth of Christ was not a pivotal moment for them until late in their run so why would they care. So my train of thought shifted to early clerics who would care. My head almost exploded until I realized they must have just started another number line and named it a Latin expression equivalent to Anno Domini (the year of our Lord) but meaning something like Prior to the Birth of our Lord. I checked Wikipedia, this should not be controversial after all, and my head is again about to explode. It says BC is a modern, English, abbreviation for Before Christ.

Please, someone, how did early scholars record dates before AD 1?

The system is actually late--Dionysius the Short, a 6c. Byazantine monk.

'In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Ceasar -- when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene --(Luke 3:1)

#102 Yes the "Year of our Lord ..." did not start until about AD 550, so the dates are, at best estimations, but between then and the 16th century (?) when the idea of negative numbers can west how did they denote a date prior to AD 1?

#103 OK but Luke was written in Roman times so I assume that that is how the Romans did it. How would someone in the age of St. Francis date the census decree that caused Joseph and Mary to travel?

> 101: It depends on culture. For example a year "ab urbe condita" (from the founding of the city) for Rome - but in practice mostly expressed in "the year when X & Y were consuls". In Greece counting by Olympiads (and then 1st to 4th year of that) seems to have been fairly popular. Ancient China counted it's years (mostly) in the format of Xth year of the reign of Y. So did ancient Egypt, but with the added complication that reigns of succesive Pharaos often overlapped because of coregency. Islamic calender, however, counts from Mohammed's flight from Mecca from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE (in lunar years mind you). And did I mention that BCE/CE years don't count up because they skipped the year 0?

And, as Tim already said, new years day rarely or never is the same as in our common calender. In fact it happens to be Chinese new year today. (Depending on which system you use it's either 4709, 4708, or 4648 now - from the reign of the Yellow Emperor). But according the Jewish calender we now have 5771-05-29 (I think, I might be off by a day or two).

If your head is still there: yes, I admit it can get quite complicated. But it only really gets complicated if you mix the various systems up.

p.s.: the point is - how you measure a year may be fairly arbitray, but when you start counting is totally arbitrary.

How would someone in the age of St. Francis date the census decree that caused Joseph and Mary to travel?

In the later middle ages - so in the times of Francis of Assisi - the system of dating AD would have become common. (According the Julian calender calculation though, not according to the current Gregorian calender).

did not start until about AD 550, so the dates are, at best estimations

That's not the source of the problem, though. Nobody lost track of what year it was, as it were. They could always figure out how many years it was since the founding of Rome, the Peloponnesian war or etc. They'd just consult one of the various chronological works, or reason it out from the text. When ancient dates are specific there is no problem putting them into our system, and being absolutely confident they're right. The source of the doubt is that the New Testament sources differ and/or lack precision on the date of Jesus birth. It has not, however, ever been an article of faith in any Christian church.

Looking for a way to better explain my question I might have come on an answer. Probably not THE answer but a possibility. Dionysius developed the prefix AD for Year of our Lord around the year 550 CE. He did not created the BC postscript for dates that preceded the birth of Christ. BC is English for Before Christ, no Latin involved. When I went looking for another, better example than St. Francis I looked at Bede, (650ce-722CE ?) and saw that he wrote "De Temporum Ratione" and calculated the age of the earth as only going back to about 4000 BC. If he calculated that date less than 175 years after AD was introduced he may have been the English speaker that started that half of the convention and he may have been the first writer to need to represent a date before Christ. That is a lot of speculation but that is what got this entire line of inquiry started. Aimless speculation.

Does my logic hold up under scrutiny?

Sure. But how does that help establishing real BCE dates - some of which would probably have been beyond Bede's comprehension? Bede had no idea about the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Pyramid Texts, or actually (beside the bible) anything that really preceded his time.

Don't take medieval people as a measure for any of these things - they didn't really have any sense for history.

It doesn't. I had always thought of AD/BC as a pair, like hot/cold and when I say that they originated at different times I was blown away. It was like having hot but not cold, at least the concepts hot and cold. Now, if it really was just a matter of less then two centuries after AD was conceived that BC was developed I can understand that. The volume of original writing then was not what it is today, fewer people, so it is conceivable that the concept was not needed until Bede started counting the "begats' back to Genesis.

You're right in sofar that Bede didn't need it to get his worldview together. But we're no longer in that situation - at least, some of us who are interested in ancient history aren't.

I suspect Bede knew a lot more than you think. But Bede was a hairy barbarian noodling about in meagre Latin writings. Someone like Eusebius had extensive knowledge of antiquity--integrating not only Biblical, Greek and Latin sources, but also the Greek writings of Berossus and Manetho, native priests of Babylon and Egypt respectively. Indeed, a lot of our Egyptian chronology is still based on Manetho, known through Eusebius and other chronographers.

Wow, the responses generated after my message (81) showed this topic was not resolved in 2008.
However none of the replies considered the fact that BCE/CE is the new ISO standard & everyone will benefit by adopting it in the same way we benefit from so many other standards.

> 112: Maybe I sounded to harsh on Bede. He was a great scholar - for his time and place. And I fully grant you that early authors having access to Greek certainly could develop an even better understanding. But, thankfully, we have been able to go beyond them.

>113

The new ISO standard? Good grief! Are we to improve international plumbing cooperation by making sure our technical specs use it?

>113 I don't have a copy of the 2004 ISO standard, but Wikipedia indicates that BC dates are represented using a minus sign, eg, -0001-12-25, for 25 Dec 2 BC. I don't believe that the ISO specifies use of CE/BCE.

>116

Great. The use of + and - when you can't actually use arithmetic to get answers?

That is, 500 minus 499.5 isn't 0.5, but -0.5, because there is no year 0.

>117 I don't understand your comment, but the ISO scheme seems properly arithmetical to me: year -1 is followed by 0 then 1, corresponding to 2 BC, 1 BC, 1 AD. In the ISO scheme, there _is_ a year 0.

Ah. So in ISO we should call 500 BC the year -501. And the point of this is to make things easier for people? For LibraryThing members? Crazy.

Tim might have been more clear if he would have said "499.5 - 500 = -1.5"

In the ISO scheme there may be one, but in actually used BCE/CE calender there simply is no "year 0". So, if the ISO scheme says so, it fails. Or, at least, you can't expect people to actually start recalculating established dates just because some commity doesn't understand what it's dealing with..

There is nothing common about this era. We may as well use BCE and CE because we have taken God out of almost everything else.

I'm sure the word 'common' was used to describe it's suitability for general use by all people including Jews, Christians & Muslims. The very fact that BC/AD has religious connotations is sufficient reason to replace them.

Thereby we replace Christ with man. Now that is something that is common in our society....

> 121. If only.

123> Sounds good to me.

>125

Before BrightCopy?

Well, clearly, then, you've got good ecumenical support for moving to BCE/CE.

Given that most people are bewildered to learn that the Gregorian calendar lacks a Year Zero, I don't see the fact that ISO DOES have a Year Zero as a problem. (It looks like adding a Year Zero is problem only for you Classicists.)

If you're looking for a really neutral dating scheme, nobody has yet put forth the astronomers' thoroughly unambiguous Julian Day. (Happy 2455597, everybody!)

Yes, a lot of people who know about and care deeply about the issue support BCE/CE. The majority of people don't know and don't care.

LibraryThing Common Knowledge, like Wikipedia, is not about voodoo ontology--changing the names to affect some sort of political change, but the highest comprehensibility. LibraryThing data is seen by literally millions of people every month—members, non-member visitors, users of other sites that use CK and patrons of nearly 300 libraries that use the data. If the point is to change their mind about the importance of the birth of Christ, wear a button. If the point is to make it possible for them to get a sense of when an author was born, use the terms they understand.

The fact remains common usage in both print and the web remains overwhelming in favor—three to ten times is common.

"323 BC" "alexander the great"
Google Web Search : 467,000
Google Blog Search : 6,960
Google Book Search : 22,800

"323 BCE" "alexander the great"
Google Web Search : 58,700
Google Blog Search : 1,030
Google Book Search : 4,060

"256 BC" "Zhou"
Google Web Search : 78,600
Google Blog Search : 1,480
Google Book Search : 2,390

"256 BCE" "Zhou"
Google Web Search : 23,900
Google Blog Search : 401
Google Book Search : 955

You made much the same argument in your resistance to the logic of ISO dates ("yyyymmdd").

Which you eventually adopted, because, you know, the ISO committee was right.

No, because I didn't want to spend time implementing it correctly—with different date formats for different people, switching around seamlessly. When it comes to dates, there is real unclarity there. The date 1/2 and 2/1 are different, but represented the same way to different people. No such confusion attaches itself to BC/BCE. It's just silly voodoo ontology.

ISO dates continue to confuse and irritate users.

Actually, I'm surprised that BCE is as common as you find it to be.

And wow, we had this identical conversation over three years ago:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/2212

129/130> It seems a bad comparison, since BC dates always have "BC" next to them. As Tim stated, simply having "1/2/2010" does not tell you which format to use. Nobody writes "1/2/2010 MF" or "1/2/2010 DF" (where "MF" means "month first" and "DF" means "day first"). But people don't write "1500" and expect you to know whether that is BC or AD. As such, the pain of the yyyymmdd standardization is inevitable because there simply is no way to solve the problem otherwise. But when it comes to BC/AD, it's not the same intractable problem that requires a forced solution.

True enough. Though it's not so much a "forced" solution, as it is a solution. It's ridiculous that we're still locked into a "Year Zero" bug here in modern times simply because thirteen hundred years ago Bede didn't have the concept of "zero" available to him.

Offhand, for what proportion of the book universe is "BCE" even an issue?
I'd think it's under 1%.

It's ridiculous that we're still locked into a "Year Zero" bug here in modern times simply because thirteen hundred years ago Bede didn't have the concept of "zero" available to him.

It's not a bug.

The same "bug" is present in AUC, AH, AM, the Seleucid era, and the thousands of other regnal and dynastic systems that have held for a time somewhere on earth Further, the same bug is present when you say that we're in the second year since uncle Roger died. You can't be in the zeroeth year since Roger died, or for that matter before he died.

because there simply is no way to solve the problem otherwise

Right. A partial solution would come from allowing people to choose, sniffing out a guess by IP, etc. Another solution would be to always write the month out, but that gets fiddly and takes more room.

Next up BrigthCopy, I'm gonna make PHP arrays start at 1!

135> I wish all arrays always started at 1. But regardless of my preference, I'm fine with them all starting at 0 as long as they all start at 0. It's those very infrequent ones that start at 1 that reserve a place in hell for their originators.

tim at #134:
It's not a bug.

The same "bug" is present in AUC, AH, AM, the Seleucid era, and the thousands of other regnal and dynastic systems that have held for a time somewhere on earth

Well, it's certainly a bug any time you step "out" of that frame of reference - as we do when we talk about the years BEFORE 1 AD.

Julian dates solve the problem, ISO 8601 solves it....

Just because lots of parochial calendars have done so, there's no sane reason for a calendar to simply skip its year zero.

And I'll trade you your "uncle Roger" anecdote: Ask people "When the did the current millennium begin"? Most of them will still tell you "Jan. 1, 2000". People still expect there to have been a year Zero before the year One.

(And seconding brightcopy at #136.)

Hey, Time magazine said that the last decade was from Jan 1, 2000 through December 31, 2010!

I think it's a short decade, like the 60s were a long one. The 90's lasted until September 11. Then the 0s went from then until the election of Obama, or perhaps Katrina.

> 127: It looks like adding a Year Zero is problem only for you Classicists.

Classicists, archaeologists, historians, etc. In short everybody actually using such dates.

As a budding historian I can say that I would have no problem using the year 0 for all the events that took place zero years before the birth of Christ. In fact, I would be willing to use the year 0 for all the events that took place zero years after the birth of Christ. (I am assuming that hundreds of years later they calculated the birth date correctly)

What is the mathematical notation for an empty set?

But what I would mind is recalculating every BCE date ever published just because of some committy.

>140

Right. Adding a year zero is only a problem for people who use it. It's only advocated by people who don't. So... we should add it!

Do you mean comity or committee?

Either way, I agree.

Oops, not a native speaker and no spell check on this !@#% machine. I meant committee

#140: Classicists, archaeologists, historians, etc. In short everybody actually using such dates.

I take your point, but, really, the set of scholars affected reduces to just "classicists and historians of antiquity", which is pretty much who I meant when I said "classicists" - as it's relatively rare for "archaeologists" to actually have specific-year precision in their dates.

(Nobody's going to make anybody revise a paper talking about a dig from "~100000BC" to make them say "~99999BCE".)

For that matter, I'm not sure I understand the magnitude of the problem even for classicists. How long was the reign of Augustus? (27BC to 14 AD, obviously 40 years.) The current dating convention is illogical.

This sounds like the argument for metric time. You know, because it's "illogical" that you divide an hour into 60 minutes rather than 100, a minute into 60 seconds rather than 100, a day into 24 hours rather than 10 or 100.

I think it's going to have about as much luck.

> 146: Oh, I agree the system is illogical. Sure it's mathematically "lame" that they didn't start at 0. But calendars are mostly arbitrary anyway. In fact I think the whole BCE/CE devide is illogical. However: there is such a thing as established usage.

And if you want to use logic: it's +1 that really should have been 0. So logically we would have to say that we're in 2010 now, not 2011.

Why don't we start with something easier - like convincing Americans that the ground floor is 0, the floor above it 1, the basement -1, ... To get from the basement to the floor one above the ground floor you have to move up two floors.

as it's relatively rare for "archaeologists" to actually have specific-year precision in their dates.

First, I imagine you're only interested in pre-historic archaeologists--people who excavate neanderthal waste dumps, or whatever. Numerically, I suspect that's much the smaller set of archaeologists.

>149

So, what you're saying is that we should no longer claim be the the #1 nation in the world? We should be the #0 nation?

No, we are in the basement...

Not sure the pre-historic archaeologists are such a minority. After all, "pre-history" depends on area - here in northern Europe it leads up to Roman invasion.

But, essentially, I agree. This isn't about carbon dating and such. Those dates essentially aren't that accurate anyway. But if/when I would have to date a find on coin dates - for example - this suddenly becomes a huge problem.

Those dates essentially aren't that accurate anyway

Right. But those archaeologists already have a system—BP.

And anyway, if the dates aren't accurate, why bellyache over the possibility of a one-year problem calculating across the AD/BC line, when performed by a literal-minded but poor mathematician?

#150
First, I imagine you're only interested in pre-historic archaeologists...

(This is an irrelevant aside, but, to answer the question, the last dig I went to was Late Woodland, 1000 -1400 CE (but with evidence of habitation going back to 1500 BCE). Before that, I had last visited a fully 'historic' 17th C site.)

Anyway, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that it's more logical to inconvenience every single Classicist than it is to make me subtract by one every time I see a "BC" date....

One can dream, though....

Edited to add: The above is SARCASM. I yield.

And: oops, I forgot an 18th C dig I visited recently.

Deams are not permitted in the current ISO standard. Perhaps in a future revision.

> 153: Exactly. For BP 30,000 (plus/minus a margin) dates - or anything like that - it doesn't matter anyway.

But if we come to the date of death of Alexander the Great, or the reign of some king or the office of some consuls, it does.

Anyway, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that it's more logical to inconvenience every single Classicist than it is to make me subtract by one every time I see a "BC" date....

But only the Classicists—and ancient historians, etc.—have real occasion to use it or really know what the hell any of it means. Inconveniencing people who aren't comfortable with BC dates is like adjusting atomic weights to use ounces because shop keepers are having trouble with them. :)

Anyway, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that it's more logical to inconvenience every single Classicist than it is to make me subtract by one every time I see a "BC" date....

But since there are millions, or even billions, of years BCE and only a couple of thousand post that, surely it would make more sense to adjust the CE dates ;-)

Seriously though - I don't want to go that way. But adjusting long established BCE dates, just because some people don't understand them, makes no sense.

>152
After all, "pre-history" depends on area - here in northern Europe it leads up to Roman invasion.

And here in northern northern Europe, it's another thousand years or so ;-)

Right, sorry, didn't mean to diss you Scandinavians.

...just put those battleaxes down nice and slowly before anyone gets hurt.