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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Just to make sure I understood this, that would be used as "17th settecento" to mean 1700s right?

(This Xth century business always bothered and genuinely confused me to no end and everyone always dismissed my objections that it's a confusing thing to say. I'm a bit surprised, but also relieved, to see this thread exists. Yes, please, kill all off-by-one century business in favor of 1700s and 17th settecento or anything else you fancy, so long as it's 17-prefixed/-suffixed and not some off-by-anything-other-than-zero number)

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"settecento" can be read as "seven hundred" in Italian; gramps is proposing to use a more specific word as a tag for Italian art from the 1700s. Of course, 700 is not 1700, hence the "drop 1000 years". The prefix seventeen in Italian is "diciassette-" so perhaps "diciasettecento" would be more accurate for the 1700s. (settecento is shorter, though.)

Hope this clarifies. Not to miss the forest for the trees, to reiterate, the main takeaway is that it may be better to define and use a specific tag to pinpoint a sequence of events in a given period (e.g. settecento) instead of gesturing with something as arbitrary and wide as a century (18th century art).

You're looking for millesettecento [1]. Italian doesn't do 10-99 hundreds, just 1-9 hundreds and 1-99 thousands.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMIGnMs4VZA

Think of it as the 700s, which is a weird way to refer to the 1700s, unless you are taking a cue from the common usage. That’s just how the periods are referenced by Italian art historians.

> That’s just how the periods are referenced by Italian art historians.

And Italian people in general.

Not much different from 60s refering to 1960 to 1969, to my mind

settecento means "700". Just proposed above as a way to say 18th century or 1700s, same as we sometimes remove the "2000" and just say "the 10s" for the decade starting 2010 (nobody cares for the 2011-as-start convention except people you don't want to talk to in the first place).

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