Millennium - Debate Over Millennium Celebrations

Debate Over Millennium Celebrations

The common Western calendar, i.e. the Gregorian calendar, has been defined with counting origin 1. Thus each period of 1,000 years concludes with a year number with three zeroes, e.g. the first thousand years in the Western calendar included the year 1000. However, there are two viewpoints about how millennia should be thought of in practice. One viewpoint relies on the formal operation of the calendar, while the other appeals to other notions that attract popular sentiment. A number of countries have legally adopted ISO 8601, also used in other contexts, which uses the astronomical calendar, in which year counting starts at 0. Thus, when using this calendar, the millennium starts at x000 and ends at x999. There was a popular debate leading up to the celebrations of the year 2000 as to whether the beginning of that year should be understood (and celebrated) as the beginning of a new millennium. Historically, there has been debate around the turn of previous decades, centuries, and millennia. The issue is tied to the convention of using ordinal numbers to count millennia (as in "the third millennium"), as opposed to using cardinal numbers (as in "the two thousands"), which is unambiguous as it does not depend on which year counting starts. The first convention is common in English speaking countries, but the latter is favored in for example Sweden (tvåtusentalet, which translates literally as the two thousands period).