Subject: Re: [lojban] centripetal / big endian pattern

From: PILCH Hartmut <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 19:35:09 +0000 (/etc/localtime)

> Because of normal language habits. I don't know if German is an exception, 
> but in every language I know, it is very rare to give time in minutes 
> without also stating the hour, and time in seconds is never used (which 
> would be proper "little endian"). We do in English sometimes say "ten 
> after" or " a quarter till", which still has an marked if unstated hour; we 
> don't answer what time it is with "10" unless we mean "10 o'clock" (i.e. 
> hours).

Exactly these habits also apply to months and days. One often talks 
about month/day dates in Chinese, and if one needs to specify the year,
one prepends it at the beginning.

Btw this is exactly what Lojban tanru do. If you need to be more
specific, you prepend another delimiting word.

> Internet URLs are designed for computers and are not a human language, 
> hence are irrelevant.

URLs are human language, IP addresses are computer language.

> Lojban is not concerned with what "should be". This is not a language 
> reform project. the question is what is internally consistent with the 
> language design, which is not optimal nor is it trying to be.

Exactly. To me, little endian dates seem inconsistent with the language
design of Lojban and consistent with the habits of English.

-phm