> Counting from 0, 2019 would still be the 19th year of the 21st century. I think you meant to say the "20th" year (off-by-one error!), since 2000 would be the

> Counting from 0, 2019 would still be the 19th year of the 21st century. I think you meant to say the "20th" year (off-by-one error!), since 2000 would be the "1st" year under your grammatical assumptions. I think it's safe to assume that if we conventionally counted from 0 instead of 1, we wouldn't refer to the initial thing as "first" (or "1st"). If we did maintain that construction, we would probably just refer to the initial century as the "0th century" and then 2019 would be the "19th year of the 20th century". > But then 2000 becomes year 0 of century 20, which is confusing English. I think it's only confusing because it's unconventional, not because there's something inherently more confusing about it. There have been plenty of languages that haven't even had counting systems that do anything more than "alone, pair, many" .. sure, you can find contexts where counting in general is confusing. > The 3rd minute of the 2nd hour of a marathon is 1:02. Right, under current 1-based counting convention, but the point of this discussion is that this inconsistency exists for basically no reason (or rather, historical reasons—look up the history of "0"). When people want to do arithmetic on ordinal numbers, they end up subtracting 1 to turn them into a zero-based natural number, then add 1 again to turn them back into an ordinal: century(year) = floor((year - 1)/100) + 1 century(2020) = 21 You can reduce the likelihood of off-by-one errors by just changing your representation of ordinals such that they start from 0: century(year) = floor(year/100) century(2019) = 20 I suspect most off-by-one errors can indeed be seen as due to this inconsistency between conventional ordinals and the more arithmetic-friendly zero-based naturals. Again, since the former is simply convention, I claim it would be better if our convention were different.