Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30672 invoked from network); 12 May 2000 00:14:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 12 May 2000 00:14:36 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO Zeke.Update.UU.SE) (130.238.11.14) by mta3 with SMTP; 12 May 2000 00:14:34 -0000 Received: (from thorild@localhost) by Zeke.Update.UU.SE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id CAA21294; Fri, 12 May 2000 02:14:33 +0200 Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 02:14:33 +0200 Message-Id: <200005120014.CAA21294@Zeke.Update.UU.SE> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Centripetal-centrifugal, little-endian--big-endian, subsets-contents, etc. In-Reply-To: References: <4.2.2.20000511063957.00adeca0@127.0.0.1> X-Mailer: VM 6.34 under Emacs 20.2.2 From: Thorild Selen X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 2665 Content-Length: 2415 Lines: 51 PILCH Hartmut writes: > > Because you tried to express English as ymd, and it doesn't work. > > I didn't try, but it does work: > > day 20 . > which day 20 ? > month 5 day 20 . > which month 5 day 20 ? > year 2000 month 5 day 20 . > > And it is not coincidental that the centripetal date format, while being > alien to all of western Europe, has started making inroads in America. I'd like to add that the yyyy-mm-dd format is common in written Swedish, especially for dating tickets, documents, letters and such. In spoken Swedish and inside bodies of text, dd-mm-[yy]yy is more common, but then the month is usually spelled out ("12 maj 2000"). If that order is used when the date is written in a purely numerical format, a slash is usually used between day and month. Thus: 2000-05-12 (Often used outside of text, but sometimes inside text) 12 maj 2000 (Commonly used inside text, and in speech) 12/5-2000 (Same as above, but in numerical format -- note the slash) None of the formats above seem strange to a Swede, and as you see, the chosen form is usually decided based on context. Many would probably say that the yyyy-mm-dd order is used because we are much better at following ISO standards than the rest of the world, but it clearly has its advantages (easy to sort by, for example). Anyway, there is hardly ever any confusion, while the way in which dates are written by US people sometimes confuse me :) I think that the most important thing is to have the fields strictly ordered by significance (year-month-day or day-month-year), a good reason being that a logical language should avoid irregular patterns where possible. Of these two, yyyy-mm-dd seems like the most logical to me -- it fits so nicely into the pattern yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss, and I don't think that anyone here would prefer ordering hours, minutes and seconds in any other way when writing a time of the day. (Alright, many like to stick an "am" or "pm" at the end, but that is kind of silly since most ought to be able to count from 0 to 23 in a modern society. I'd like to know how common it is to use a 24-hr format in other parts of the world; I can say that in Sweden it is quite common, although less common in informal speech. It seems to be quite common in Poland too, so at least we're not alone... Does anyone have any comments on this?) /Thorild