Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 June 4

= June 4 =

Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (2)
Hello. I wrote not long ago always on the same subject. I was talking about Toshiro Mifune and how the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (Rashomon), was kept by him. Here in the photo still portrays Mifune with the statuette, but for winning another film "Miyamoto Musashi" by Hiroshi Inagaki. Is it possible that earlier the award could also have been kept at this point by the film's lead actor, not just the director? If two clues make a proof...Thank you. https://www.facebook.com/ToshiroMifuneOfficial/photos/mifune-holding-the-oscar-trophy-for-musashi-miyamotowhich-won-the-best-foreign-p/1077524388936006/?paipv=0&eav=AfYZxDo7Vk1yc-0NOkvGg3qTD9sLjiFYXdRlqwrE3tQ7AoBhdr_0NZ4rd6Mro-HS8X8&_rdr 93.41.96.138 (talk) 09:54, 4 June 2023 (UTC)


 * What can one say? Lacking concrete evidence proving that Mifune did not keep the statuette at the time, one cannot say with confidence that it is impossible. If one cannot say it is impossible, it follows that for all we know it is possible, just like for all we know it is possible that Dino Buzzati skipped breakfast on 1 October 1933, or that an ancestor of the Basque language was once spoken in Ireland, or that Earth will be hit by a large asteroid on 11 August 2040. --Lambiam 11:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The fact of the matter is that Rashomon did not win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Instead, it won an Academy Honorary Award, and that award was for the film, not for any individual person. Cullen328 (talk) 23:34, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The very point of the question is that the award was for the film as a whole, but appears to be kept, not by the film's director, or its producers, or the foreign nation, but by the main actor. The Academy Awards for Rashomon (1950) and Musashi Miyamoto (1954) were given for being, respectively, "the most outstanding foreign language film released in the United States during 1951" and "Best Foreign Language Film first released in the United States during 1955". So these Academy Honorary Awards, given to the Best Foreign Language Film, were in fact Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film even before the separate category was introduced in 1956. --Lambiam 09:46, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Century years
Do century years (years divisible by 100, such as 1900, 2000 and 2100) end or start century? I have always thought that centuries start with year ending in 00 and end in year ending in 99. --40bus (talk) 18:07, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The 21st century is from 2000 to 2099. Why do we add one when we name centuries?? It is the fault of the fact that there is no "zeroth century"; therefore the first century gets the years through 99 and the 20th century was 1900 to 1999. Do you see this?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:22, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Not quite. The first century was from 1 through 100, the second from 101 through 200, etc. The 20th century was 1901 through 2000, and the 21st century is 2001 through 2100. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:29, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Those who believe that somewhere there is some "authority" who has the power to decide what words mean, nearly always believe that that authority has decreed that a century starts with year xx01 and ends with yy00.
 * Those who believe that the meanings of words reside in what people in general mean and understand by them and nowhere else noticed that many people (but not everybody) celebrated "the new millennium" in 2000 and not in 2001. ColinFine (talk) 18:43, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * What authority has declared that the first "century" only has 99 years? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:49, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The only "authority" involved is the definition of "century" and the ability to count. As for what "many people" did, many people do many stupid things. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:56, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * In Finnish, "21st century" is called 2000-luku. 21. vuosisata is only rarely used. Everyone in Finland say that "2000-luku" begins in 2000 and ends in 2099. In Finnish Wikipedia, "1st century" is called Ensimmäinen vuosisata, and Finnish Wikipedia says it to begin from 1 and end in 100. Whereas 2nd century is called 100-luku and Wikipedia says it to begin from 100 and end in 199. In Swedish on the other hand, 1st century is referred as 000-talet, while others are like in Finnish (100-talet, 200-talet,...1900-talet, 2000-talet, 2100-talet etc.). In my opinion, the "2000s" sysetm is better than "21st century" system because it directly tells the first two numbers of a year and sets then beginning on '00 and ending in '99. --40bus (talk) 19:05, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * 40bus; the reason the century number doesn't match the number of the start of the year is simply because there is no "zeroth century". What did I get wrong?? Georgia guy (talk) 19:11, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Years in "2000s" start with 20, years in "1400s" start with 14, and years in "2600s" start with 26. The "20" in "2000s" is the century number. --40bus (talk) 19:22, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * One can argue that "the 2000s" started with year 2000. However, the 21st century and the third millenium started with year 2001. As Georgia guy indicates, there is no century 0; and more to the point, there is no year 0. A.D. or C.E. starts with year 1. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:25, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * But why English uses "21st century" more often than "2000s", and Finnish instead uses "2000-luku" more often than "21. vuosisata"? --40bus (talk) 19:49, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * You'd have to ask the Finns that question. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:00, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * We should really ask the Italians why they call the 20th century novecento, which literally means "nine hundred". --Lambiam 23:24, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * They do the same with all the centuries -- novecento instead of millenovecento, ottocento, settecento. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 18:33, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Not quite all; what about the 12th and 21st centuries? --Lambiam 16:22, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
 * As you have OFTEN been told, "why?" is not really an answerable question in these matters. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 21:39, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Consider a six-month old baby for a moment. The child is age 0, ie it has not yet completed a year of life and yet it is in its first year of life. Skip forward 9 years and the child is nine years old, but is in its tenth year. We, in the Western European tradition, conventionally use years completed for our ages, but other traditions use the ordinal numbers ("he is in his thirtieth summer"). Year 1 is the first year of the era, not one year completed. Year 10 is the tenth year of the era, not 9 completed. Therefore the years 1-10 are the first decade and years 1-100 the first century. To get back to the OP's question, years ending in 00 are the last year of the century, years ending in 01 are the first years. Going on from this, the December before January 1 AD is in the first year before the era and therefore 1 BC, there is no place and no logical meaning for a "year 0". Martin of Sheffield (talk) 20:47, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Trivia note: In some of the older US Census details, children under a year of age were often shown as a fraction rather than age 0. Like if a child was 5 months old when the census was taken, its age might be shown as "5/12". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:58, 4 June 2023 (UTC)


 * You open up a book and start reading at a page called Page 1. Do you see any sort of note that says "We're calling this Page 1 because there is no Page 0"? No? And why not? Because that would be incredibly stupid, that's why not. The first item in any series is always the 1st. So it was with the 1st year of the Common Era, the 1st century, and the 1st millennium. The 2nd year followed the 1st year, same for the centuries and millennia.
 * Now, mathematically-minded people like to put things into logical sequences, and given that time didn't actually start at year 1 CE, they like to visualise time like a number line, where 2 follows 1, 1 follows 0, 0 follows -1, -1 follows -2, etc. That's all fine, except the CE was like a new beginning, the start of a completely new series, and the idea of calling years before the supposed birth of Christ "27 BC" etc was a much later idea. The CE series and the BC series were never meant to be continuous. Also, the CE years start from 1 and go forwards, whereas the BC years start from -1 and go backwards. So of course there was no year 0 in either series because we never start counting anything with 0. That shouldn't even need to be stated, and it certainly doesn't explain why the 21st century started on 1 January 2001 rather than on 1 January 2000. Except if you think about it, there is no other reasonable conclusion.
 * An analogy would be, if you consider the numbers 21-30 of some series, that is the 3rd group of ten numbers. Right? Not the second, but the third. This, even though all of the numbers except the last start with 2 and not 3. So, just because all of the years of the 20th century except the last start with 19 and not 20, does not mean that that century ended when the years starting 19- petered out. The 20th century ended when the 2000th year ended, not the day before the year 2000 started. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:53, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * For a different take on the issue, see "Why numbering should start at zero" by the eminent (although somewhat eccentric, but I guess that won't put you off) Dutch computing scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra. --Lambiam 23:16, 4 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Quoting from the entry 106% in The Century Dictionary of 1911: "Thus the first century of the Christian era began with the year 1 and extended to the end of the year 100; the third century began with 201 and ended with 300; and the eighteenth century began with 1701 and ended with 1800, the year completing the hundred-year period in each instance giving name to the century." This convention is also the one I was taught in school. --Lambiam 23:04, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The usual justification for this convention is that there was no year 0. But do we have any concrete historical evidence that the years 1 through 100 actually existed? --Lambiam 23:09, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
 * They existed, but they weren't called that at the time. They are numbered retroactively.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 01:12, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Why don't we number the year 0 CE then retroactively? --Lambiam 09:10, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, astronomers do use a "year zero", but the calendar in general use doesn't. So, when one speaks of the "20th century" in a general contextt, one is implicitly using the no zero year calendar and the century boundary must then fall between 2000 and 2001. User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:19, 5 June 2023 (UTC)


 * The "usual justification" is the greatest misnomer of all time. That suggests we normally start counting things at 0, but this was a special case in which we started at 1 because 0 was not available. But that is just not so. We never start counting anything at 0, whether it's available or not. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:37, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Perhaps I should have said "usual explanation", found in fact earlier in this very thread. As I noted above, We does not include everyone. --Lambiam 09:27, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Around here, many people celebrated the start of the third millennium on 1-1-2000. Many celebrated it again on 1-1-2001. Inconsistent? Sure, but never let consistency stand in the way of a good party.
 * Millennia, centuries, years, months of the year, days of the month are all counted, so they all start at 1. Today it is the 5th day of the 6th month of the 2023rd year since the Epoch (little-endian in head-initial languages). When we measure things, instead of count, we do start at zero: it's now 10 hours and 11 minutes past midnight UTC. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:10, 5 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Exactly. User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:20, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
 * The current year is 4th year of 2020s decade, 24th year of 21st century and 3rd millennium, 2,024th year since birth of Jesus and there was year zero. --40bus (talk) 18:29, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
 * 2023 is the 23rd year of the 21st century and 3rd millenium, and is the 2023rd year since the estimated year of Jesus' birth. There was NO year zero. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:37, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Wrongly estimated (although a good effort for the 6th century). The current scholarly concensus is around 5 or 4 BCE. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.221.195.5 (talk) 03:22, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes. We don't know the year of Jesus' birth. Nor the day, which was almost certainly not December 25. Nor do we know for sure when He died, because it's unclear exactly which day of the Seder the Last Supper was. But even if we found an ancient birth certificate, it's unlikely we'd change our year-numbering system. Just as we're unlikely to decide there's a year 0 and then have to alter all the B.C. dates by a year. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:26, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
 * As you may know, astronomers (I used to be one) have introduced a year 0, because otherwise the mathematics of orbits don't work, and our BCE dates have to be adjusted by one should we need to correlate an astronomical event (such as an eclipse) with a historical record. We don't expect the rest of the world to take any notice of this, of course.
 * To avoid inconvenient switches from minus to plus dates we count from a zero point of noon on 1 January 4,317 BCE (4712 Julian) and calculate in days fractionated by decimals instead of hours. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.221.195.5 (talk) 19:16, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
 * [To avoid future readers' confusion, there was here a remark by another User to the effect that 'we know Jesus died on a Friday', to which I responded below. For some reason, the remark has been deleted. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.221.195.5 (talk) 22:39, 9 June 2023 (UTC)]
 * Actually, we don't know that he died on a Friday. People forget that the weekly Sabbath day was Saturday, but that other days of religious holidays were also sabbath days. (I am relying here on lectures by James Tabor.)
 * In the year in question, Passover (determined by the Moon and therefore not fixed as to date or weekday) ran from Friday, beginning at dusk on Thursday. The Last Supper was not a Passover meal (as many suppose), but a meal on Wednesday, the day before the start of Passover. Yeshua was arrested in the early hours of Thursday, died (unexpectedly quickly) later that day, and (allegedly) was hurridly interred before dusk on Thursday when the Passover Sabbath began.
 * This was actually anomalous, as by Roman law (which executed him for sedition) his body should have been left on the cross for days or weeks and then thrown into a mass burial pit, and the latter also applied in Jewish law to those executed for blasphemy. (I suspect his sympathisers in the Sanhedrin – which was bitterly divided over Yeshua and many other matters – used influence and/or bribery to subvert the official procedure.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.221.195.5 (talk) 19:16, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

One other place that century years appear in is the "divisible by 400" exception for leap years in the Gregorian calendar. The years 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, and 2300 are not leap years, while 2000 and 2400 are leap years. So, with the xx01 to yy00 ranges for centuries, every fourth century (the 20th, 24th, etc.) ends with a leap year, while the other centuries (the 18th, 19th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, etc.) end with a non-leap year. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 17:15, 8 June 2023 (UTC)