5 ms·
Well, it's not really backwards, that would be too easy. Example: 3 482 975 is "dreimillionenvierhundertzweiundachzigtausendneunhundertfünfundsiebzig" which i
by davidkunz 5y ago
Well, it's not really backwards, that would be too easy. Example:
3 482 975 is "dreimillionenvierhundertzweiundachzigtausendneunhundertfünfundsiebzig"
which is in pseudo English:
"three million four hundred two and eighty thousand nine hundred five and seventy"
Also beware of (German -> English):
Million -> million
Milliarde -> billion
Billion -> trillion
Billiarde -> quadrillion
etc.
- rapnie 5y ago> Milliarde -> billion Yeah, and you also see e.g. news anchors making mistakes in translation saying things like (Dutch) "Ze investeerden een biljoen". Turning a billion into a trillion. And I also heard that Biden wants to pump a "triljoen" in the economy (quintillion)
- kijin 5y agoOh, the joys of middle-endian notation. But who are we to laugh at them, the American date notation (M-D-Y) is just as weird.
- lordgroff 5y agoYou could be Canada. MM-DD-YYYY? DD-MM-YYYY? Unless you're in Quebec, you never have a clue. Government officially recommends YYYY-MM-DD due to this, but in the real world it's wild west.
- majewsky 5y agoI'm a German in an international work environment. Since I'm also fed up with this endless confusion, I'm sneakily forcing YYYY-MM-DD on everyone by quietly editing every instance of a date that I find in the wild, and it's progressing rather well.
- geoduck14 5y agoOh you deviant, you! I'm inspired. Keep it up.
- pezezin 5y agoSpanish guy working in Japan in an international environment here. Little by little I'm forcing YYYY-MM-DD for file and directory names, and DD-Mon-YYYY as the display format for applications and for the documents I write. Time for a rant. I recently had to fix a web application where the guy who originally installed it set all the fields to free form text, and dates were a mix of: - D/M/Y: good, European order. - Y/M/D: also good, CJK order. - M/D/Y: who the hell did it, if we never had an American in the project???? - Years with two or four digits. Every time I see a date written with only two digits for the year, I want to kill the motherfucker who did it. - Months written as numbers, full names, or abbreviations. Well, at least nobody used Japanese era years, or Roman numerals for months, but any other combination you can think of was there. 600 records, took me several hours because the software is not exactly user friendly and I had to convert each date to its internal representation by hand. After that, I force every single web form to use date pickers for date fields. But of course text fields are still a mess, maybe I will adopt your approach too ;)
- unbanned 5y agoI've started warming to M-D-Y. Monthly cadence is more usual in business, so you can easier prioritise thoughts during conversation over D-M-Y
- blago 5y agoI recently realized that M-D-Y makes a lot more sense than we give it credit for. Date formats needn't be about the cardinality of the units, in this case it's about spoken language. The M-D-Y format simply follows the order of the words in (EDIT: American) English. We say January 4th, 1970. Try reading D-M-Y in (EDIT: American) English and you will quickly realize that it doesn't make sense. I suspect most other spoken languages use 4th January, 1970 so D-M-Y feels more natural to them. EDIT: I'm sorry if I offended you by equating American English with English. Point taken. I misspoke. The point remains.
- dan-robertson 5y agoI would say “[the] 4th of January 1970” in English. I think saying “January 4th” is an Americanism. It feels to me that in some sense 4th is acting as an adjective coming after the noun it modifies, which is unusual in English.
- lebuffon 5y agoInteresting that Americans commonly say "The fourth of July". Is that a carry over from 1700's American parlance?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 5y agoI always like the visual look of D-M-Y in writing; a word bounded by two numbers (1 January 1970). If it's going to be all numbers, 1970-01-01 seems like the right way to do it. (RFC3339 is the best time format.)
- snthueoa 5y agoYes, in England we’d typically say “(the) 4th of January, 1970”, in line with D-M-Y. I have no idea if the correlation is causation, or which caused the other.
- zebracanevra 5y agoSorry, but English speaking countries that use DMY simply say "4th of January", and it in no way doesn't make sense.
- jeroenhd 5y agoProbably an unpopular opinion, but despite its stupid order, I think M-D-Y makes complete sense for (American) English. Some languages (or dialects of English) say "twelve/the twelveth (of) January 2022", so 12-01-2022 is the obvious notation. Many English dialects (the majority, given that it's how America does it?) would say "January twelveth, 2022", so 01-12-2022. It's not that the notation is spun around, some versions of English just pronounce the dates backwards! This is the exact opposite of the question asked about numbers, where English (usually, mostly) follows the "logical" order. As language is subjective, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to pronounce and order things. The West doesn't use lakh and crore, but there's no reason why the short scale is any better. People just decided to say things one way and stick to it.
- Someone 5y agoSo, you’re argument is that US English makes two mistakes, so it’s fine? I think that, in some cases, some systems are objectively better than others because they are simpler. YYYY-MM-DD is such a case. Given that it hasn’t ‘won’ globally over others, it seems it is not that much better, though. hh:mm:ss is one, too, not because no objectively better ones exist, but because none of them get used (using mixed-base base 24, base 60, base 60, plus, when using milliseconds, base 1,000 doesn’t make sense, but we didn’t manage to replace it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time), so we’re stuck with it. That may have to do with the fact that it breaks down for larger units, anyways. We could have a 10-day week, but for months and years, it’s impossible to avoid things getting messy.
- jeroenhd 5y agoThe way a language work is not a "mistake". It's simply how language works. People are not robots and they will exhibit illogical behaviours if that's what feels better to them. YYYY-MM-DD is probably the clearest way to express dates for computers only because it's not ambiguous and it's easy to sort. Decimal time was a mistake. We cannot group our 365.24 days given by nature in a round, base 10 number so any attempts to make the entire system decimal is foolish. We could divide the day in 10 hours with each 100 seconds, but that would mean redefining all SI units to use this new second as a base. Distance is defined as the time it takes for light in a vacuum to travel a certain distance, we'd need to change that distance and all other units OR have the "scientific second" and the "metric second".
- barbarbar 5y agoIsn't the last part: nine hundred and seventy five?
- bserge 5y agoSee how easy it is to get confused? :D
- azernik 5y agoThe point is that the way you say "seventy five" in German is "five and seventy"
- davidkunz 5y agoin pseudo English (meaning a direct translation) it is "nine hundred five and seventy", in real English it is "nine hundred and seventy five"
- dredmorbius 5y agoThis is the short-scale / long-scale naming convention for powers of ten. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale Million (10^6) / milliard (10^9) / billion (10^12) is, or at least was, common in British English, where American English is million / billion / trillion. Numbers above 999 million were typically written as, e.g., "thousand million (10^9), million million (10^12), etc. Long scale also has billiard and trilliard. American usage seems to be dominant now, the UK officially converted in 1974.
- qw 5y agoNorway used to have the same system, but the government introduced a reform in the 50s to simplify. Many still use the "old" way. The "correct" modern way is the same as in English.
- mr_toad 5y agoIn UK English a billion used to mean a million million up until about 50 years ago.