What Year Is It?

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWO.

Continuing from A Man And His Role.

Time travel would not explain comprehension of the language but, as we have seen, some time travelers have their ways of coping with that. See the blog search result for diaglossa.

Someone who suspects that he has time traveled needs to know what year he is in. He is unlikely to be greeted with: "Welcome to 1000 A.D."

"Temporal agents always notice date & time; we must."
Robert Heinlein, "'-All You Zombies-'" IN Heinlein, The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag (London, 1980), pp. 126-137 AT p. 126.

"'What year is this?'
"We gaped at him. 'Well, it's the second year after the great salmon catch,' I tried.
"'What year after Christ, I mean,' he prayed hoarsely.
"'Oh, so you are a Christian? Hm, let me think... I talked with a bishop in England once, we were holding him for ransom, and he said...let me see...I think he said this Christ man lived a thousand years ago, or maybe a little less.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Man Who Came Early" IN Damon Knight (Ed.), 100 Years Of Science Fiction (London, 1972), pp. 185-212 AT p. 191.

When disguised time travelers in ancient Tyre insist on booking passage on a particular day, this gives a canny local the idea that precise remembering might be profitable so:

"'Back then, I couldn't read or write, but what I could do was mark whatever special things happened each year, and keep those happenings in order and count back over them when I needed to. So this was the year in between a venture to the Red Cliff Shores and the year when I caught the Babylonian disease -'"
-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 317.

This enables him, when asked by a Time Patrolman in 950 B.C., to state confidently that a particular event occurred:

"'An even one score and six years, come fifteen days before the fall equinox, or pretty near to that.'"
-ibid. p. 316.

We have learned some interesting ways to tell what year it is:

the second year after the great salmon catch;
the year between a venture to the Red Cliff Shores and the year when I caught the Babylonian disease...

Many people who have lived A.D. have not thought in terms of A.D. - and, of course, no one thought in terms of B.C.