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Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2015 15:19:34 -0400
From: Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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On 7/2/2015 2:53 PM, Michael Turniansky wrote:
>      Bob, it's true that ISO-8601 set the standard as Monday as first
> day, but that's not culturally neutral.

It is still the *international standard*. Creating anything else might 
be more "neutral", but it won't be consistent with the international 
standard.  And we decided long ago that international standards trump 
cultural neutrality.  Which is also why we ruled out playing games with 
time-of-day which has at least as many problems as weeks.

The metric system isn't culturally neutral either (obviously biased 
against Americans %^( ).  But we still decided to put all the metric 
units and prefixes in the gismu list.

Even so, jeftu does have the possibility of supporting non-standard 
weeks.  I would have no problem with people using esoteric variants of 
weeks in that context.  But I would strongly object to enshrining 
non-standardness in anything official, and people treat jvovlaste as 
being quasi-official.

There is no point in cultural neutrality in vocabulary if it makes it 
necessary to learn non-standard systems.  Otherwise, we arguably should 
be going to some sort of metric system of time and date, with 100,000 
seconds in a day and 100 days in the year. We wouldn't want to be 
culturally biased towards earthism.

>    So, to reiterate, billions of non-Xtian people refer to
> other-than-Monday as the first day of the week.

Not when they want to communicate internationally.

> It's hardly universal.

International standards are by definition universal.  At least for the 
164 nations that are part of the ISO (which is a helluva lot more than 
Europe).

And this whole question of standards in dates and times was something 
that was actually argued about and formally decided by the membership at 
a meeting back when no one had even conceived of a byfy.  Indeed, at the 
time I was arguing for use of a base 12 system for time of day, and was 
strongly overridden.

lojbab

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