source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 18:09:36 +0200 Subject: Re: millenium From: mr88cet@texas.net (Gary Morrison) My personal take on the matter is that the only problem here is that we're trying to liken our BC and AD year-numbering systems to positive and negative versions of one another. It's more appropriate to view BC and AD numbering schemes as two separate year-numbering systems. The monks who came up with our year-numbering scheme had no concept of zero, much less of negative numbers. The seeming confusion factor of there being no year zero becomes irrelevant as soon as we stop trying to liken "BC" to a negative sign. Given that, there's no conceptual reason why we can't think of there being a year 0AD or 0BC (as long as we don't try to equate the two of course). There's no reason whatsoever why a given year can't have two different designations, each based upon a different numbering system. After all, the Chinese would call those years "The Year of the Dragon" or whatever. So as far as I'm concerned, the first decade consisted of years 0AD-9AD (inclusive), the first century 0AD-99AD, and the first millenium 0AD-999AD. There is no fallacy in that at all. The only thing that's odd about it is that the year 0AD is more commonly called 1BC, but that's just a convention. Now there IS a fallacy in assigning year numbers from one, and its the same as that in counting musical intervals from 1. You can't count years like you would count rocks, because years have a beginning and an end, and rocks do not. You can however count boundaries between years as though they were discrete objects. That result is equivalent to counting the number of whole years completed since time zero. That however implies the existence of a year zero. Failure to recognize the distinction between the boundaries between units of measurement and the spans of units of measurement is exactly why a musical 3rd above a 4th works out to be a 6th rather than a 7th. Imaginarily laying out all intervals in front of us and numbering them from one, belies the fact that they are measurements of pitch DISTANCE. If we had never considered a unison as the first of several rocks to count, but instead as a pitch-difference of zero, then that interval addition problem would have worked out correctly as a 2nd plus a 3rd equalling a 5th. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 1 Jun 1997 18:45 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA05996; Sun, 1 Jun 1997 18:45:51 +0200 Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 18:45:51 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA06001 Received: (qmail 15437 invoked from network); 1 Jun 1997 16:45:39 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 1 Jun 1997 16:45:39 -0000 Message-Id: <970601124324_-1531211566@emout02.mail.aol.com> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu