this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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It's just semantics. When you are born, you are in your first year of life, not your zeroth year of life. After a full year, you are one year old. Grammar varies from language to language, and sometimes one feels more natural.
Imagine everyone in English said "I'm in my 32nd year" instead of "I'm 31 years old." Now you meet a foreigner who says the opposite. Translation issues abound!
Also, years themselves are technically numbered in this same "dumb" way: the Common Era (secular version of Anno Domini, "In the Year of our Lord") began with 1 CE, not "Year zero", because it was supposedly the First Year of Christ (and the concept of zero didn't even exist then). Not that it really matters, because IIRC nobody knows the actual date (if any) of the birth of that Christ character to within a single year anyway.
Admittedly, it was more than 500 years after this Christ character, as you so amusingly notate, that they even started counting. And the concept of zero as a number was in place by then. The concept of zero as nothingness, or void, is much older. So really, the index from 0 or 1 debate is now at least 1500 years old ;)
While I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I said "that Christ character", I was also trying to be accurate: there are people who believe Christ was 100% made-up (and lots of others who don't of course), and I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
Personally, I'm an agnostic atheist, so I'd need to see some actual evidence before I could honestly say I believe he did exist, but I'm not gonna say I know he didn't exist either.