Sure, but it's an incredible amount of work to change the year numbering, and it's easy to change the word we use for the calendar.
The French revolutionaries tried it, and they discovered that no matter how much people agree with the idea and want to switch in theory, it's really, really hard to do.
Mind you, the French Republican calendar was a LOT of changes, all at once. First, they started counting over at year 1.
That'd be a big enough change, but they also decided to use a calendar with 12 months with nice secular, names, each with 3 weeks, where a week had ten days with nice, secular names (plus some extra days on the end of the year as needed).
That'd be a huge change, but they also decided to switch to the decimal system, so a day would have exactly 10 hours of 100 minutes each. And that turned out to just be way too much, and the whole thing fell over.
Anyway, that's kind of tangential to your point, but I just like thinking about the French Republican calendar. I hope you have a happy 4th of Pluviôse, Ere Républicain 232.
CE means “common era” which refers to the same time period that AD does, which stands for Anno Domini and means “the year of our lord,” which is rooted in the Christian faith.
You will also see “BCE” and it means Before Common Era, which replaces BC, which means “Before Christ”.
The Georgian calendar (at least in the numbering of years) is a Christian construct, and it therefore makes sense to name year 0 after the year of Christ's birth. Whether or not one acknowledges his lordship or whatever, you are still operating in the Western tradition which is impossible to understand without Christianity.
It's just petty power tripping. Some people have that need to feel superior by swapping the dating system to something meaningless and arbitrary. What makes this era "Common"? Presumably the birth of Christ, since that's still when you are setting the origin of years. So the rename is utterly pointless. It's still A.D and should be referred to as such.
I'd have more respect if these revisionists went full Jacobin and plonked Year 1 down as some new date, and named the calendar after something new.
I quite like Neil deGrasse Tyson's take on this. In science, we usually let the person that invented something name it. The Christian church invented the current calendar, therefore we should accept the name they gave it.
We never canceled other religious names in our calendar, including the months named after Roman gods or the days of the week named after Nordic / Celtic gods.
The problem becomes more evident if you write the meaning out in full: "anno domini nostri Christi", or the year of our lord Christ. Recognizing Jesus Christ as lord obviously presents some theological issues to non-christians. Saying Wednesday doesn't have the same issue of recognizing Odin's divinity.
You’re right. It’s the nature of things, being inclusive often means excluding an other.
On the other hand I’m glad we’ve all converted on one common reference for dates and don’t have one for each sphere of influence, cuz then something published in China vs Japan vs Taiwan vs Europe and the Americas vs Egypt vs… who knows what would be messy.
> I’m glad we’ve all converted on one common reference for dates
At least most places that use other calendars also keep track of the Western year in parallel.
My Thai wife was born 543 years after me, even though we were born in the same year. ("Hi, this is my wife, from the future!") Our wedding certificate contains only the Thai year. As I remember, for official purposes, Japan counts years of the current emperor's reign, along with an official name for each reign.
It doesn't fundamentally change the fact that we date things based on Jesus Christ. It doesn't make it inclusive, since its still rooted in Christianity. Papering over it doesn't change that fact. It's just stupid.
Yes. It's the plain English version of "AD", which is Latin. English was good enough for Jesus in the Bible to speak, so it should be good enough for the rest of us instead of this high-falutin' shibboleth language they only teach at the likes of Oxford and Cambridge.
