Era codes for the Gregorian calendar: AD/BC or CE/BCE #26
Description
There's discussion on this topic in #12 and elsewhere. I wanted to summarize some of the main points.
- Being well-known
- @markusicu says: BC/AD are much more widely known and used than BCE/CE.
- @Manishearth says: BCE/CE are a 300-year old convention that have in recent times grown rapidly in usage. I'm not sure if they're more or less common than BC/AD at this point: actually referencing the eras is itself somewhat rare.
- Religious history
- This decouples the calendar from the Catholic church, acknowledging that it is used outside of a religious context
- @markusicu says: I am somewhat sympathetic with a push to talk about the calendar in non-religious terms, but this calendar was defined by the catholic church, and trying to remove all religious connection seems futile.
- @sffc says: We have the
iso8601calendar, which is the "global" calendar; it therefore isn't necessary to considergregoryas the global calendar - @Manishearth says: I also think "trying to remove all religious connection seems futile" is a non sequitur: That is not what is proposed here, I don't think it's fair to oppose a specific situation where alternatives are readily available and in common use with the argument that this is not feasible in general. Like, yes, removing religious connections from weekday names would be a futile task because there really isn't a good alternative (not in English, at least), but there is an alternative here.
- Proleptic BC era
- @Louis-Aime says: The era "BC" in the proleptic Gregorian calendar is fraught, because "BC" is universally understood to refer to Julian dates. It is incorrect to use "BC" to refer to proleptic Gregorian years.
The correct answer here is not black-and-white to me.