Subject: Re: [lojban] Centripetal-centrifugal, little-endian--big-endian, subsets-contents, etc.

From: Thorild Selen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 02:14:33 +0200

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
<stress tone="ironical">better at following ISO standards than
the rest of the world</stress>, 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