Speaking for the Hungarians: you're right, if you get used to it, you actually don't even notice the leading year if you don't care. The whole thing just seems

Speaking for the Hungarians: you're right, if you get used to it, you actually don't even notice the leading year if you don't care. The whole thing just seems to be made up. In other words, rationalization of a habit. Why big endianness is great though, in practice is that most of the time you actually do care about the year when you use the written form AND it's unambigous. The problem with the reverse notations is not that it seems illogical to some people. The problem is that both d/m/y and m/d/y is used and you can't have the faintest idea which one you are looking at. Now in theory we could have y/d/m, but we fortunately don't, so seeing the first number being a 4 digit one, you know how to interpret the date.