Why not 20th Century being 2000- 2999?
In: 0
Cuz we don’t have the 0th century. Starting counting from 0 could of course make sense, but by now it would feel very odd to quite many people. Year 100 is by the way 99 (full) years from the start of the calendar, since years also start from 1.
Interestingly enough, the widespread use of number 0 is a somewhat recent thing. It has been used in some contexts and it has had some equivalents historically, but for the majority of the world, for the majority of history, zero wasn’t really a very well defined concept in mathematics or record-keeping.
The calendar that our more modern calendars are based on and that started counting years from the (assumed) birth of Jesus was created in the 6th century, by Dionysius Exiguus. He was an Eastern European and European mathematics and records-keeping at the time did not recognize zero. Zero as a number did not exist.
How you are supposed the read those years is more like this: “We’re now living in the _first year_ since the birth of Jesus”. These are ordinal numerals. Think _first_, _second_, _third_. While cardinal numbers, which represent quantity or the amount of something, are the likes of _one_, _two_, _three_.
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