Question on verbalizing "negative" years.

This may be a silly question.. but when speaking out loud and referring to years in past ages that are in the negative. Like say -5297 AR (year of Earthfall) how do guys say that out loud. Do you say "negative 5297 AR" or "minus 5297 AR?"

Just curious... any suggestions would be helpful.

5297 before AR? (BAR? :) )

I would go with BAR

I would go with basically what we do now ... 0+ is 'CE', before that is 'BCE'. Just just put a Before in there.

Thanks guys, good call!

Well, if you look at a lot of older documents and speeches, they will often say things like...
In the Year of Our Lord X
or
In the Year X Before the Coming of Our Lord

You could do something like this when verbalizing. BAR is fine for writing.