Claire Xen  🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🧙🏻‍♀️ BLM  🏴 🚩

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?

You premise is wrong already: decades start at xxx0 for the same people for whom centuries start at xx00. And vice versa. And then there's people like me who just cringe inside and secretly like to celebrate the new decade/century twice in a row

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.)

Swedish. No-one ever says "20:e århundrandet" except as a quite contrieved direct translation of "20th Century."

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