It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian.
We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.
> It's a bit like asking people not to use the Gregorian calendar in places that are not predominantly Christian.
I think it is different in that numbering years is useful, and we need to have an agreed starting point, and by historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (likely slightly incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturally-neutral starting point – astronomers sometimes use the Julian period starting at 4713 BCE, but while that is more religiously neutral it still isn't culturally neutral. (It is based partially on astronomy, but also partly on the taxation cycle of the ancient Roman Empire, and that's still Western-centric.)
By contrast, applying names to periods of time is far less useful and far less portable across cultures. The 1800s looked very different in different parts of the world, but it was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we only do this for a handful of historical periods anyway (most seem to be named after British monarchs – Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian, etc). Applying those period names to places outside the British Empire is a bit like applying Japanese era names to European history. The whole thing of historical era names seems to be somewhat dying anyway – references to decades (the 1990s, the 1920s, etc) seems more popular in discussing more recent history – the Elizabethan era was in the 16th and very early 17th century, not in the 20th and early 21st.
> We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.
"mid-to-late 19th century" covers roughly the same timeframe, and everyone knows what that is.
I wonder if that's because more recent periods are considered in more detail - both for granularity and as a complex period. Whereas the further back you go, the more they get grouped together and simplified into stories.
"The 80s" (1 decade) is considered in more detail than "the interwar period" (20ish years), which is considered in more detail than "The victorian era" (70 years) which is considered in more detail than the Renaissance (200 years) which is considered in more detail than "Late antiquity" (500 years).
I suspect in 2100, not very many people will be talking about the 1980s in great detail, and if the term 20s is used will refer to the current decade
> we need to have an agreed starting point, and by historical accident we've all adopted an estimated (likely slightly incorrect) birth year for the founder of one of the world's major religions. It is hard to pick a culturally-neutral starting point
There are some astronomical cycles that could be used as a neutral reference.
For example, due to the precession of the Earth's axis, the star which is the North Star changes over a 41000 year period. So we could pick the time when the axis was pointing most closely at the star Vega, 11000 years ago, as the epoch.
> For example, due to the precession of the Earth's axis, the star which is the North Star changes over a 41000 year period.
That's a great idea you have there. I like it. I am going to quibble with some of the finer details though:
41,000? I thought the best estimate for the Platonic year, the time for the precession of the equinoxes to complete one revoution, was 25,772 years?
The Gregorian calendar has a 400 cycle. If we are sticking with the Gregorian calendar, any new epoch needs to be aligned with the 400 year Gregorian cycle, or else leap year calculations will suddenly get more complicated. So that suggests using something like -23600 CE (23601 BCE) as the starting point. That's 64 Gregorian cycles before 2000 CE, which is the closest possible whole number of Gregorian cycles to 1 Platonic year prior to 2000 CE (a Platonic year is 64.43 Gregorian cycles).
The Gregorian cycle is of course based on the AD/CE chronology, modulo 400, so it is still an indirect link to Christianity. But I think it is as practically close to culturally neutral as we could get, without also changing the calendar. (Which isn't really Christian in origin anyway – it was developed in pagan ancient Rome, and the 7 day week is pre-Christian in origin as well, through Judaism, and possibly some ancient Babylonian influence as well – the only Christian to touch it was Pope Gregory XIII, and his aim was only to make its leap year rule more astronomically accurate, albeit he ended up linking it more tightly to the AD/CE year numbering in the process.)
It’s still a political decision though. The Romans would elect new consuls each year so instead of numbering their years, they just designated them by whoever were the two consuls that year. Later scholars numbered the years since the supposed founding of Rome. The French Revolutionaries created a calendar where Year 1 was the founding of the First Republic, but it didn’t catch on.
Well, the Romans also kept track of the years since the founding of Rome -- ab urbe condita (AUC). Writers in antiquity used the years AUC; that wasn't a modern invention.
It is true that writers in antiquity used AUC. However, it was only used infrequently – primarily when celebrations were held to mark the city of Rome's anniversary, as part of imperial propaganda, and also in historical writings. In everyday use, naming years by consuls was more common (especially in the West), and by the regnal years of the emperors (especially in the East and in later periods). After the reign of Diocletian, use of his regnal numbers were continued–in part because he introduced a system of having four emperors simultaneously (two senior and two junior). Even though that system only lasted 30 years (at the end of which Constantine became the sole emperor), the use of year numbering from Diocletian's reign stuck in the East – anno Diocletiani, or as Christians came to call it, anno martyrum (since Diocletian started the last major Roman campaign of persecution of Christianity). The Diocletian era was most popular in the East; in the West it was known, but less used. The monk Dionysius Exiguus proposed anno Domini as a replacement for anno Diocletiani. It became the standard in the West, but less so in the East. The Coptic Orthodox Church continues to use the Diocletian era to this day. Greeks (and also, through Greek influence, many Slavs) preferred to number years from the estimated creation date of the world (similar in principle to how contemporary Judaism does it), but using two different estimated dates of creation – hence the Alexandrian era and the Byzantine era. It is only in recent centuries that Greeks and Slavs have standardised on anno Domini.
Use of AUC was actually far more popular in the West in the Renaissance than it ever was in antiquity. It helped produce a false impression that it was more significant in Roman history than it ever was.
I neurotically checked the Wikipedia article on AUC and I got the impression that at least the term "AUC" was mostly a Renaissance invention, so I tried to hedge against that. Apparently classicists would actually add "AUC" to Roman manuscripts as they transcribed them.
> By contrast, applying names to periods of time is far less useful and far less portable across cultures. The 1800s looked very different in different parts of the world, but it was the same 100 year span everywhere. And we only do this for a handful of historical periods anyway (mostly seem to be named after British monarchs – Victorian, Georgian, Edwardian, etc). Applying those period names to places outside the British Empire is a bit like applying Japanese era names to European history.
Sure, but a lot more of the world was part of the British Empire during those periods than has ever been part of the Japanese (and there's a lot of second-order uses for cultural/artistic trends that originated in the British world of those times but are found elsewhere, e.g., “Victorian architecture”.)
> and there's a lot of second-order uses for cultural/artistic trends that originated in the British world of those times but are found elsewhere, e.g., “Victorian architecture”
I don't think there is an issue with speaking of "Victorian X" where X culturally originated in the British Empire. People talk about "Second Empire style" in the history of US and Canadian architecture, but neither was ever part of the Second French Empire. The problem is when people start talking about "Victorian X" when they aren't talking about the British Empire or its cultural exports, they are talking about things that happened outside it and not under its particular influence or involvement, but merely at the same time.
I'm a native English-speaker, and the use of the term similarly annoys me, though only just a little. Why not be clearer an simply say "19th century" (early/mid/late)?
Reminds me of the story of the British headline "Fog in channel -- continent cut off".
Ask English-speaking people, or indeed even people living in the UK, which years describe the Victorian era, and I'd expect it'd make clear that the term is wildly ambiguous as a way of describing a period of time. For most it describes clothes and architecture, a certain morality and works of fiction, not a range of years.
And in that sense it's wildly misleading to apply it outside of the UK.
No it is different. Years are just numbers and can be converted between different calendars. "Victorian" implies a certain political and cultural context. It's like saying "prohibition era London" or "Kentucky during the Sultanate".
Gregorian calendar was directly adopted in many places. It is still Gregorian calendar in France as is Ming vase sitting in a museum in New York. Arabic numerals used on Space Station do not stop being arabic just because there is no Arab in sight.
The numerals are "Indo-Arabic". Arabs were a conduit but the number system was invented in the Indian subcontinent by Indian mathematicians, this was then adopted, centuries later, by Arab mathematicians who in turn exported/exposed it to the West.
The numbering system was invented in India, but the particular numerals used for it in Europe (012345689) were invented by Arabs in North Africa. All the Europeans did with them was to rotate the "4" by 90°. This is easy to get confused about because of the subsequent conquest of North Africa by Europeans and the divergent Eastern Arabic numerals (٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩), which are what most Arabs use today. When you read about how Fibonacci promoted the use of Arabic numerals, adapted from the Arabs, it's easy to think that he must have been looking at "٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩", and that either he or some European copying his manuscript adapted these to the the "12345" forms you see in https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Liber_ab.... But if you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Brahmi_numeral_system... you can see that he would have had to coincidentally adapt them back to more nearly resemble the forms in the inscription in Chaturbhuj Temple at Gwalior from three centuries earlier.
> All the Europeans did with them was to rotate the "4" by 90°
To be honest, from the second picture you've linked, it would seem that North Africans didn't do almost anything with at least 0, 1, 2, 3, 7, 9 either. So what Dürer printed in the 1500s has 0, 1, 2, 3, 7, 9 from the Indians, 6, 8 from the West Africans, and 4 and 5 seem to be European developments. I have no idea how you get European "4" from the Ghobar numerals by rotating the respective Ghobar numeral. In fact topologically European "4" is more similar to the earlier Gwalior numeral, and the early European "4" in your picture is the Gwalior "4" upside down.
> he would have had to coincidentally adapt them back to more nearly resemble the forms in the inscription in Chaturbhuj Temple at Gwalior from three centuries earlier
...but why are you contradicting yourself now? First you say that numeral shapes used in Europe were developed by North Africans and then you say that the forms come actually from India. Which one is it, then?
To me, the North African (Western Arabic) forms look intermediate between those from the Gwalior temple and those used by Fibonacci. The Eastern Arabic forms don't. Fibonacci traveled back and forth to Algeria with his father in his childhood, where he studied mathematics. Although he credited the Indians with the method of calculating with place-value numerals, he never traveled to India, but he traveled extensively to North Africa.
Even if this were the case (I can't say that I can see such intermediarity clearly), we're not using Fibonacci's numeral shapes from Liber Abaci today so that doesn't seem to matter much. And as far as "we're using North African numbers today" is concerned, pretty much all of the European shapes used today that are similar to the North African ones from Fibonacci's time with the exception of 6 and 8 are the same shapes that I would be able to recognize in Gwalior inscriptions even if had no prior exposure to the history of numerals and you only told me to read those shapes as decimal numerals, so I'm not sure that one could say that these shapes were invented in North Africa, as opposed to just transferred through North Africa from India in a recognizable shape.
I only see minor differences between today's numeral shapes and the shapes on the pages of Liber Abaci I've been able to find. (Have you found a relatively complete online 13th-century edition?)
I agree that "transferred through North Africa from India in a recognizable shape" is pretty much the case—but not without change. As you point out, by looking at the 6 and 8, you can see that that's how the transmission happened. Even the 5, 7, and 9 seem recognizably intermediate to me.
"Although the Hindu–Arabic numeral system[1][2] (i.e. decimal) was developed by Indian mathematicians around AD 500,[3] quite different forms for the digits were used initially. They were modified into Arabic numerals later in North Africa. "
Arabic numerals does not only describe the concept of decimal system, but also the shape of digits. Hence "arabic numerals" is the correct description, and "Hindu-Arabic numerals" describes different numerals -- shapes for digits.
Fair enough. The numeral system is Hindu and the typography is derived from Arabic thus Arabic, although what we use in most of the rest of the world diverges quite a bit from truly Arabic typographs. One could argue 0, 1, 2, 3, 9 are similar with some rotation , but 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 do not look like Arabic numbers. Curiously there is overlap of some E. Arabic numerals and Brahmi numerals.
I'd definitely go with Chrisomalis on this one and just call them "Western numerals" to distinguish them from both Western Arabic and Eastern Arabic numerals. As you say, it's about the different shapes, and the three are definitely not the same.
We have to adapt our language to the person we are communicating with, and if they are familiar with the time frame associated with Queen Victoria, I can see how it makes sense to use it. We could refer to the period of Isabella II of Spain, but they wouldn't understand us, so it would be rather pointless.