From: "Stephen C. Carlson" <scarlson AT mindspring.com>
To: Biblical Hebrew <b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: Is this a rock or not? I Would like to know
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 18:05:59 -0500
At 11:40 AM 2/19/01 +1300, Bill Rea wrote:
>Of course, one could always ask -- "Common" to whom? Dressing up a
>Christian dating system with "neutral" language doesn't change its
>Christian nature, so why do the CE/BCE thing at all? If someone is
>going to be offended by the date 2001 A.D., then they should be equally
>offended by 2001 anything.
My favorite convention, merely because I really prefer compactness,
is that of Brooks & Brooks, THE ORIGINAL ANALECTS, in which dates
in our current era (CE, AD) are rendered as normal integers, and
dates before our current era (BCE, BC) are rendered with a leading
zero, much like the notation for uncial manuscripts. Thus, Rome
was founded in 0753 and fell in 476.
Another possibility mentioned here is to use +/-, but my only
complaint that is there is no year 0, so the mathematics implied
by + and - does not work across the divide. I.e. the number of
years between +476 and -753 is really 476 - (-753) - 1.