Who decided that decades start at xxx0 even though centuries start at xx01? What were they smoking? Are there only 9 years in the first decade of the gregorian calendar?
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Centuries only start at xx01 for those who speak languages where "19th Century" is a common thing to say. For us who speak languages where we always say the equivalent to "the eighteen hundreds" the xx01 concept seems very strange.
Now this is interesting. I only speak German and English and "21st Century" is a common thing to say in both of them afaict. Which languages don't have that? (Only languages that are in widespread use in cultures that use the gregorian calendar of course.)
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Swedish. No-one ever says "20:e århundrandet" except as a quite contrieved direct translation of "20th Century."
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This struck me as well. We just say e.g. "80-talet" (the 80s) when speaking of decades or 1500-talet when speaking of centuries. It always takes me a couple of seconds to translate between the nth century and the (n-1)hundreds
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