The New Millennium Starts 2001

Simple facts, described for everyone (from schoolgirl/-boy to professor)

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This is the original version written in 1999, which exists in an actualized and supplemented version for the year 2000. Those who don't have special interest in this original text with its view from 1999, should read the actual version. The links in this 1999 version may partly be obsolete.

At the first look, it seems clear that the next millennium starts at the beginning of the year 2000, because the first digit changes from 1 to 2. Indeed, 2000 is a very special number, and it's easy to understand that the beginning of the year 2000 will be celebrated with enthusiasm and by computer experts with some tension. But one year later, there will be cause for celebration again, because the new millennium really starts on 1/1/2001.
 

We're gonna have two great celebrations!!!

The facts that lead to this statement are very simple:
When you count years, you begin with the year 1. The first decade ends at the end of the year 10, the first century at the end of the year 100, the first millennium at the end of the year 1000. Thus the second millennium ends at the end of the year 2000.
That's it. If you're convinced already, you need not continue reading. Except to collect responses for arguments that surely will come.

Here are possible objections from people who don't give up quickly. All the following is intended to deal with such objections.
 


Overview

?  Change from 1999 to 2000 and from "nineteenhundred..." to "twothousand..."  1
?  If you start counting at the year 0 ...  2
?  Comparing years of life with years of our era - graphic answer  3a
?  Comparing years of life with years of our era - theoretical answer  3b
?  On December 14, 1899, the German Bundesrat decided ...  4
?  Jesus Christ was born at least 2 years before year 1...  5
?  "The nieneties" comprise the years 1990 through 1999 ...  6
?  What will all the people do who booked expensive voyages?  7
?  Why does everybody talk about the year 2000 ?  8
   Websites that give a correct view of the facts  !

? The word millennium stands for a big change in the counting of years. This change happens when all four digits of the year get a new value by changing from 1999 to 2000. There is no big change from 2000 to 2001.
Nearly all living people have always spoken the actual year as "nineteenhundred...". From one moment to another, we will start to say "twothousand...". This deep change should be emphasized and celebrated.
1 Who will not agree to that? For me, the change to the year 2000 is the greatest occasion since 998 years for a gorgeous New Year's Eve party. Many, many generations never had such a turn of the year!
We celebrate the change, but let's stay linguistically correct: We celebrate the change of the first digit. Or the change of all 4 digits. Or the change of the term for the hundreds. Too bad that there is no simple word for it. The simple word is not "millennium". The change that the word millennium implies is not identical with the change of all digits.
If we talk about the millennium, we use a well defined word that only makes sense if we relate it to our era. That leads us to the beginning of the year 2001, the start of the 3rd millennium of our era.
Is that something very special? Need we celebrate it more than other turns of the year? Everyone may decide that for himself. Many will celebrate it as greatly as the year 2000. Now here we're back to our motto: We're gonna have two great celebrations!!!
 

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? If you start counting at the year 0, the third millennium will start with the year 2000.
2 1582, the Gregorian Calendar was created which defines the chronology still in use today. Counting of the years "after the birth of Christ" (A.D.) was already established at that time - it was defined in A.D. 525 by Dionysius Exiguus. Before that, there was (besides others) the varronic era which started counting from the foundation of Rome. A.D. 1 is equivalent to the varronic year 754. The varronic year 1 became 753 B.C., i.e. there is no year 0, the year 1 B.C. being directly followed by A.D. 1.
However, this circumstance was disturbing for the astronomers in their need for a continuously extendable time axis, so they invented (in contrast to our common chronology) the astronomical chronology. And there you have a year 0, which is equal to 1 B.C., there are even negative years, where the year -1 is equal to 2 B.C. and so on. Though, it would be far-fetched to say about the year 2000 enthusiasts that they all would use the astronomical chronology. Before that, you would have to teach children at school that Rome was founded in the year -752.
From the links below, you can see that the astronomers are very well at home within the Gregorian Calendar and have come to the right conclusions.
 
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? From the day on when someone celebrates his 20th birthday, you say he is 20 years old, until the next birthday comes. It should be the same with the numbers of the years. I.e. on 1/1/2000 our era should be 2000 years old and not only 1999.
There are two answers, one graphic and one theoretical. Both have the same result.
Sorry for the length of the answers, but these are the essentials of the "millennium question".
3a When talking about the age of people, we mostly speak about e.g. the 19th birthday or say that someone is 19 years old. Rarely we talk about someone being within the 20th year of his life. And who actually realizes that the big 20th birthday only comes after the end (!) of the 20th year of someone's life?
Just let's imagine that our era were a human being, with its birthday always on January 1. The counting of years of our era would then be equal to the years of its life. The first year of its life was the year 1, because there was no year 0. After its end, on New Year's Day of the year 2, was the 1st birthday of our era. Now it was 1 year old and had begun the 2nd year of its life. And now we simply go 1998 years further. New Year's Day of the year 2000 is its 1999th birthday. That means it is 1999 years old and has begun the 2000th year of its life. Thus, its big 2000th birthday will only come after the end of the 2000th year of its life, that is on 1/1/2001.
Now we see clearly why we quickly come to wrong results when comparing the counting of years of people's lives with the counting of years of our era. The year of our era must only be compared with the rarely mentioned (running) year of life and not with the much more commonly used age in completed years.
Annotation: We must not stretch this imagination too wide. Today's definition of our chronology includes that the New Year's Day always is on January 1. Many centuries before, definitions were totally different. Thus, when speaking historically of the year 1, we must not take January 1 as beginning of the year. Above, we did this only to find the right year for the millennium. Because all people using our chronology will celebrate the millennium on January 1 of a year, we need not quarrel about the day.
3b When dealing with years, we have to distinguish between so-called cardinal counting and ordinal counting. Cardinal counting gives an amount of elements (1 element, 2 elements, 3 elements, ...), whereas the ordinal counting enumerates and thereby names each of the elements (the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd, ... or element 1, element 2, element 3). Cardinal counting gives the value 0 if there is not yet one complete element, whereas the first incomplete element already gets the ordinal number 1. This difference of 1 persists up however high the number. That sounds very theoretical, but in everyday life we unconciously use cardinal numbers (c.n.) and ordinal numbers (o.n.):
For measurement of time, e.g.: During the 90th minute (o.n.) of a soccer match, the stop-watch shows 89: ... (c.n.).
For age informations: The 20th year (o.n.) of someone's life begins with his 19th birthday (literally: 19th anniversary of birth, o.n.) and lasts until one day before his 20th birthday. During the whole 20th year of someone's life, you say he is 19 years old (c.n.). Or you give more exact informations and say e.g. 19 1/2 years (c.n.) or 19 years and 11 months (c.n.) or nearly 20 years old (c.n.). But you never would say he were 20 years old as long as he lives within the 20th year of his life.
Our chronology was defined as ordinal counting of years, months and days, and was formerly fully reflected in our language when formally saying for example "in the 1400th year of the Lord" (anno domini 1400). This accentuation of the ordinal counting of years has got lost in the last centuries. In former times as well as today, it seems to be difficult for people to consider the difference of 1 when determining the number of passed years (c.n.) out of the number of the year (o.n.), thus realizing that e.g. on July 1, 2000 only about 1999.5 years of our era have passed. But everyone realizes that on November 1 of a year only 10 months of that year have passed - is it because the numbers are smaller?
 
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? On December 14, 1899 (!), the German Bundesrat decided that the 1/1/1900 had to be taken as the beginning of the 20th century. Thus its end as well as the end of the 2nd millennium must be on December 31, 1999.
4 Already before the year 1700, people quarreled about when the new century would begin. Before each turn of the century, there were some intense confrontations between differing majorities. At the last turn of the century, nearly all official fixings were made for 1/1/1901, except in Germany, what was caused by a desire of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Ultimately, that was a redefinition of the term "century", in a way which could not last for long. E.g. the (German) dtv Brockhaus Lexikon writes about the term "century": „... the 20th century began on January 1, 1901 and will finish on December 31, 2000.“ (translated)
Concerning the coming millennium, e.g. the U.S. government gives a statement referring to the U.S. Naval Observatory, with the result 1/1/2001. The German Bundestag will not have to decide about this question, because the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt has already given clear statements, with the same result, of course.
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? Today's knowledge says that Jesus Christ was born at least 2 years before year 1. Those who want to celebrate the millennium at the end of 2000, will be further in time from the real event.
5 Surely it's right to assume that the majority of those who enthusiastically look forward to the new millennium, want to relate it to our era, not to the exact day of the birth of Jesus Christ. Those who want to celebrate the 2000th birthday of Jesus Christ will have to realize that the right time for that has already passed. But even the newest information about the birth year of Christ has a tolerance of more than one year and did not lead to a redefinition of chronology in any country of the world.
 
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? If you talk about "the nineties", you mean the years 1990 through 1999. Thus, the new decade starts in 2000, and the same applies to the new century and the new millennium.
6 Of course, nobody would say that the nineties would comprise the years 1991 through 2000. But the conclusion that the nineties were identical to a certain decade of our era (the 200th), would be taking a step too far. The first decade of our era comprised the years 1 through 10, the second the years 11 through 20, and so on as described above. So if you said: "In the twenties of our era, Jesus Christ began healing people", you would surely mean the years 20 through 29, because they all have a 2 at the decimal place and are all spoken "twenty-...". But the 3rd decade of our era comprised the years 21 through 30. Thus, these are independent expressions which - related to the beginning of our era - can not be identical.
Now that already hundreds of decades of our era have passed, it's just understandable that the relation of a decade to our era is not made correctly by any of us. A decade is a long period, but for a human being still easy to survey, and normally there is no reason to relate it to the beginning of our era. And so you correctly take the word "decade" as a synonym for any continuous period of 10 years, e.g. we all surely celebrated "the new decade" at the beginning of 1990. Why not? As long as nobody comes up with the beginning of our era ...
But if not hundreds of millennia of our era have passed and we now have this very special event that has to be widely and hugely celebrated (because we can't experience it every couple of years), then we should know very well when we celebrate what. And nobody will deny that the millenium to be celebrated relates to the beginning of our era.
 
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? What will all the people do who already booked expensive voyages because of the millennium? Economies will crash if all activities have to be deferred by one year or people have the right to cancel their voyages.
7 It's surely right to assume that sellers as well as buyers of goods and services related to the millennium really believed that the new millennium would begin with the year 2000 (positive exceptions exist, e.g. Millennium 2001, Inc.). There are a multitude of possible rules to solve such problematic cases without driving firms into ruin. Probably, many people will celebrate the change of all digits (2000) with the expenditure that was originally intended for the millennium. But nobody should raise a loan just to celebrate the millennium (2001) with at least similar expenditure.
However, facts can't be removed by economic considerations.
 
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? It's all the dogmatism of boring know-alls! If the millennium comes only in 2001, why does everybody talk about 2000?
8 There are many good reasons to talk about the year 2000 and to celebrate it greatly (see above). And that - without some reflection - the word "millennium" is taken as a synonym for it, is not a bad mistake, perhaps except for historians and mathematicians, if any of them should use this word this careless. If you know a historian or mathematician (or similar professions), simply talk with her/him about this. If you don't know one, a schoolgirl/-boy with interest for mathematics might be enough. The facts are (see above) quite simple.
The main reason why little could be heard of these facts in the public up to now, surely is that few people considered this subject important enough to carry it to wider circles of people. This is supposed to change in 1999.
 
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We're gonna have two great celebrations!!!

!English websites that give a correct view of the facts (there are German sites, too):
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Many thanks to Dr. Arndt Brendecke (historian at the University of Munich and author of the book "Die Jahrhundertwenden. Eine Geschichte ihrer Wahrnehmung und Wirkung", Campus Verlag 1999) for expert support during the completion of this page.
Many thanks to David Williams from Great Britain for corrections to the English translation of the first version. This text is for all English speaking people, so I left some Americanisms.

Feedback to this page is welcome to the author, Walter Schittek:
Please understand that I can't reply to each mail because I'm very busy within and without employment.