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Re: [lojban] jbonunsla - location
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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