The last two posts were about the complicated way in which people count age and birthdays in Korea, but did you ever stop and wonder why Koreans are born at 1 year old? If you ask anyone who's been in Korea a while, the answer you will doubtlessly hear is that the 9 months the baby spends in the womb counts as 1 year. If you don't think about it, it seems to make sense, but give it a moment's thought and really is just total nonsense. Firstly How can 9 months be counted as a year? And if you don't know when the child was conceived, how on Earth can you start counting it's age?
The real reason is mainly mathematical, but has a lot to do with Korean culture too.
Korean culture is extremely conservative. Ancient practises, customs and habits have been fossilised into the fabric of modern korean society and they still shape attitudes today. For example In the 17th century some European sailors shipwrecked on the shore of Jeju-do were arrested and held captive in Korea for 13 years basically because they were foreigners. Not much has changed: just think about your friends with Korean wives! hahaha... Anyway Because Korean culture is so conservative many things which other cultures have forgotten about are kept alive. And one of these things is inclusive counting.
Before the invention and importation of zero to Europe and East Asia, inclusive counting was the standard. Remember Roman numerals? There's no zero there. When zero arrived a new counting system was invented and inclusive counting was forgotten, in most places, for ever.
Inclusive counting basically means that instead of counting from 0, you start counting from 1. And when people counted days, months, years, they used this system.
Today is Saturday.
Not counting inclusively, if I say "in two days" I mean Monday. Saturday is "0", Sunday "1" and Monday "2".
Counting inclusively Saturday is "1" Sunday is "2" and Monday is "3".
So that means if I wanted to say "in 2 days (on Monday)" using inclusive counting I would have had to say "in 3 days"!
It's exactly the same with years and if we count backwards.
It's 2012
Not counting inclusively if I say "three" years ago I mean 2009 -> 2012 is "0" 2011 is "1" 2010 is "2" and 2009 is "3"
Counting inclusively, 2009 is 4 years ago! ->2012 is "1" 2011 is "2" 2010 is "3" and 2009 is "4"!
So whenever you count anything inclusively the value is one more than not counting inclusively! Just like Koreans are normally one year older than their western counterparts born in the same year!
Although Korea doesn't use inclusive counting officially, it has been kept for counting birthdays, much like the lunar calendar is used for traditional holidays. So the real reason that Koreans are born at 1 and not zero is that they count birthdays using an ancient system of counting which has no 0 and therefore starts at 1.
Bullsh!t; they count the time in the womb.
ReplyDeleteI don't really know how to put this nicely, you clearly have difficulty understanding maths - a year is made up of 12 months and pregnancy lasts 9 months (or maybe you don't understand human reproduction?). To say that ancient peoples, who across the globe were obsessed with counting the days and measuring the movement of heavenly bodies, would gloss over this discrepancy... well it makes your comment almost worth deleting to be honest.
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