Dates in the Gregorian calendar in the Western world have always used the era designated in English as Anno Domini or Common Era, but over the millennia a wide variety of eras have been used with the Julian calendar. While this issue always seems to get mired in arguments about political correctness, I'd offer another perspective. They're inconsistent.
It's very strange that going across the arbitrary division line between two years also requires a change in the language of abbreviation. Also, traditional convention says that BC comes after a date e. While that convention is no longer universally maintained, it's odd and confusing. They're prone to misinterpretation.
In particular, the language inconsistency noted above has given birth to a widely-held misconception that AD is an English abbreviation for after death i.
Obviously this is wrong, but it was actually the first explanation I heard as a child, which then caused great confusion when I encountered a teacher telling me that it meant something else in some obscure dead language. I'm not alone in having heard this false etymology, as many internet discussions will attest.
They're literally wrong. As noted in a previous answer, the birth of Jesus Christ is now estimated by most scholars to have occurred at least a few years earlier. I've seen everything from 7 to 2 BCE -- and yes, in this particular sentence, using the abbreviation BC seems to me an oxymoron. In any case, "common era" solves this problem by just admitting that we're using a common convention, which even Christian scholars now widely regard as inaccurate.
But it's still a convenient and "common" way of referring to our "era" of year reckoning. Insisting that we hold onto the older style too seems to be promoting ignorance of the fact that the abbreviations are literally false.
They cause confusion. One item of confusion occurs because of the erroneous after death etymology above. I distinctly recall asking someone about this when I was a small child: "So how do they number the years while Jesus was alive?
But even if we understand what AD means, the convention can create confusion even when Christian scholars are trying to refer to, well, the years around the time of Jesus Christ. Dates in the early Church are a bit uncertain anyhow, but if a Christian scholar is trying to relate a possible date to the timeline of Jesus Christ's life, you have to do a little conversion in your head.
In other words, when a reference to the timing of Christ's birth should have maximum usefulness due to proximity of the dates, it actually breeds confusion.
Any one of these reasons alone wouldn't be enough to argue for a new convention. After all, there are all sorts of inconsistent and illogical stylistic elements in English usage. But when you take into account that the old meanings are widely believed even by Christians to be actually wrong, you now have a convention that's actively creating confusion. BC is "before christ", whether you believe in him or not.
It's just as good as the Nth year of reign of Pharaoh Whoever - doesn't require you to believe in the deity of a particular egyptian. Do you have a question about history? Send us your question at history time. Though there are a few frequently cited inflection points in that history—recorded instances of particular books using one system or another—the things that happened in the middle, and how and when new systems of dating were adopted, remain uncertain.
Systems of dating before B. For example, the Romans generally described years based on who was consul, or by counting from the founding of the city of Rome. So Anno Domini , the year of our Lord, is a very easy transition to make, as opposed to dating the year an emperor had reigned in Rome. One of the early writers to date this way was Dionysius Exiguus, a monk who, in A. Practical use of A. But, even as it grew, people continued to use other systems like the Roman calendar. There are also some typographical conventions to consider:.
As a result, dates that occurred within the last few centuries are rarely marked with CE or AD. The use of like is widespread in colloquial speech, yet it is still viewed negatively, even by those who use it. How then, is like used in everyday language? And why do so many people dislike it? The reason for this is no mystery; they have never been a prominent part of the English writing system, unlike most languages that use a Latin script.
Although many people call them accents , the correct name for these symbols is diacritic mark or simply diacritic. Why are ships frequently referred to as she and her? This question points to the phenomenon of using creative gender assignment on nouns in English. This article will provide an outline of gender in language and the creative use of gender in English. Antidote 11 Antidote Web Antidote Mobile.
0コメント