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Comment by Deukhoofd | Hacker News Reader

This answer misses how several different universal times already existed at the time, which use abbreviations UT0, UT1, etc. UTC was a logical abbreviation for this one, considering it follows the same style, and the desire to find a good compromise between the French and the English speakers.

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FWIW, those are still in use. Here's the (rather interesting) relationship:

* UT1 is really not a time, but an angular measurement - it measures the rotation of the earth. In UT1, a day (= 1 rotation) has 86400 seconds (= 1 rotation), but those seconds are not SI seconds.

* TAI is time since some fixed epoch, in SI seconds. In TAI, a day doesn't really exist as a primitive concept, but a day (=1 rotation) has a variable number of seconds, and those seconds are SI seconds. TAI and UT1 diverge over time, continuously (due to earth's rotational speed variations).

* UTC is sort of an amalgamation of them: it uses SI seconds (like TAI), but occasionally jumps a second to keep close to UT1. In UTC, a day has 86400 seconds, or 86399 or 86401, and those seconds are SI seconds. UTC and TAI diverge, and their difference is piecewise constant with occasional jumps. UTC and UT1 diverge, but at most a second continuously, and then with occasional jumps come together again.

This nicely recapitulates phylogeny: in the origin of Babylonian timekeeping (we all now use a system based on that), hours were not of a fixed length; there were twelve of them between dawn and dusk and twelve more between dusk and dawn.

Minutes (as can be see from their clearly Latin name, "tiny") and the second division of them (seconds) are brand new and AFAIK have always been of fixed length, a consequence of mechanical timekeeping.

I wonder why a Latin name wasn’t appropriate.

Maybe because not that many (American) people learn Latin anymore.

That's the point, no? (No preference to a given nation)

Mere use of the Latin alphabet gives a preference to some nations...

Some is not one, though. Especially in the case of large values of "some"

Conspiracy theorists would have a fun time with an official language of the Vatican being selected for the purpose of anything as basic and universal as time itself, even if just for a label.

Well, my comment was more eluding to the fact that, until very recently, many Americans learned Latin as part of their primary school education. It was requisite knowledge for university.

(Secondary school, presumably)

This has not been true in America since at least before WWII and the GI Bill.

Latin was never a part of the standard primary school curriculum.

I was talking specifically about pre-WWII. My depression-era grand-parents learned it in school.

70+ years ago is not "very recent" when talking about schooling. Public schooling has only been widely available in the US for less than 150 years and only widely mandated for children in the last 100.

I think you mean "alluding". Eluding means avoiding.

They really ought to, when possible. I can't count the number of times I've encountered a new word that I could trace back to a basic Latin root. I feel like it gives you a good foundation for any romance language and goes hand in hand with the history of western civilization.

Latin is indeed still taught in elite private schools across the country. But let's be realistic: we'll never, EVER see a widespread push to get Latin into American education.

My regional public high school offered four years of it; I don't think it's that rare.

It's great for plants and animals when you want to know its official name and not the dozens of names many dozens of countries use.

I took two years of Latin in high school. I still remember the basics and it has more or less served me well. I think it made learning Spanish, which I also took in high school and college, easier.

"Puella in silva est" - "the girl is in the forest" was one of the first exercises that I remember to this day ;-p

Having memorized the Lord's prayer in Latin is a fun party trick in some circles too :-)

"Le singe est dans l'arbre"

Eddie Izzard, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sQkEfAdfY&gl=GB

I took latin too, for seven years. I finally passed with a 7 - one better than an "F" (for "fail").

It might as well be the acronym for a Latin name, "Universalis Tempus Coordinatus" or something like that...

It's worth noting for any non-Latin understanders that you can put those words in any permutation and the meaning in Latin is the same.

Universale tempus coordinatum (because of grammatical gender agreement)

I think the real reason was because we were confident about surpassing Rome and our own modern empires by the 1970s.

There was a certain ammount of "looking back to the peaks and we are but a shadow of the greats" meme well beyond they realized they surpassdd the Roman Empire with the use of the fallen in the west Roman empire and the use of Latin (amusingly paying no regards to the Eastern Roman empire aka Byzantium).

Now it is used for taxonomies still but the real reason for that is "Do you want to rename every system of classification and have to deal with two systems and names for thousands instead and avoid confusion in a vast body of work?". A resounding no and shudder would be the answer even if we had an undeniably "better" universal language for the purpose that didn't have any "politics" to it.

> A resounding no and shudder would be the answer even if we had an undeniably "better" universal language for the purpose that didn't have any "politics" to it.

So not JavaScript?

I mean, it basically is. The English, French, and Latin words are all very similar. I'm not going to embarrass myself with improper Latin declensions, but suffice it to say that "UTC" still works as a compromise initialism if you want to say it in Latin as well.

In French, most adjectives follow the noun they describe (while adjectives precede nouns in English), so the primary compromise is not naming per se, but specifically abbreviating.

It’s a good compromise and a compromise good.

Not exactly. In French, adjectives can both precede or follow the noun. It's stylistic more than grammatical in many cases, and depends on how the sentence is constructed. Nuances (e.g. proper versus figurative meaning) can be elegantly conveyed by switching the adjective.

Examples:

"Un homme grand" means 'a tall man', but "un grand homme" is more commonly 'a great man' (although it could also mean tall, depending on context or sophistication).

"Une voiture bleue" is the only correct way to say 'a blue car' ("une bleue voiture" would be grammatically wrong).

"Un petit homme noir" ('a short black man') is also correct, but "un noir homme petit" is absolutely wrong, as any other variation...

Generally, when both orders are allowed, emphasis is put on whichever comes first —the noun or its adjectives. Unless the sentence ends there, in which case the last word obviously resonates more.

Don't ask me why... It's logically as weird to me as it may seem to you. I only know from practice (like most French people I suspect) and I'm generally bad at explaining grammar (again like most, for it's really complicated). There's probably some rule somewhere about that, with three dozen exceptions, as usual in French.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did you ask L’Académie française?

They know everything. Just ask them.

Ha, you made me curious. Do you think they would actually reply to emails?! — though it would probably be faster to Google for a good manual or teacher's blog.

Btw more than "knowing", it's the official institution that officially decides on linguistic rules and their evolution, for the French language in France. It's called "prescriptivism" (higher authority decides what's right and what's not, period) as opposed to "descriptivism" (such as the American English language, for which nobody gets to make these calls, and dictionaries merely follow usages by people).

As a native French speaker who knows how to do that without knowing the rule, an American friend once told me how they remember where to put the adjective: B.A.G.S.

Most adjectives dealing with the following will precede the noun: - Beauty - Age - Goodness - Size

It's not always correct but it's a good start...

I love it, it seems to work quite well!

Reminds me of this tweet, essentially doing the same for English: https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/77200275722200268...

Latin word order is flexible enough for about anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_word_order:

”Latin word order is relatively free. Subject, Object, and Verb can come in any order; adjectives can go before or after their noun; a genitive such as hostium "of the enemy" can also be placed before or after its noun. A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words, e.g. Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius"”

Examples of adjective-noun order at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_word_order#Adjective_pos...

Interestingly that's the approach Switzerland took by adopting "CH" as its country code/abbreviation: Confoederatio Helvetica in Latin.

This was to avoid giving the appearance of favoring any of its four official languages (It would otherwise be "SE" in German, "CS" in French/Italian/Romanish).

Thanks for sharing, that's very interesting. Does that decision have anything to do with Switzerland's reputation for neutrality?

It's not a reputation but an actual policy. It's hard to untangle but the policy has more to being surrounded by other states (no ocean) and having big walls around it already, and being too small for geopolitical strength.

The country was last invaded in the napoleonic wars.

My understanding of Swiss neutrality (simplistic and very poor) is that the swiss mercenaries were too good and after they were finally defeated a ban on fielding mercenary companies was enforced and this lead naturally to the neutral stance Switzerland takes today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_mercenaries

Except the pope, being the pope got to keep his.

India's official language is English. I recall a journalist asking an Indian official isn't that a sign of British oppression? The official replied that India is home to many native languages, and to avoid favoritism a foreign language was chosen, and since the bureaucracy was already familiar with English that was the logical choice.

Well, English is co-official with Hindi. Originally, Hindi was even supposed to be the only official language at a national level (states can have their own official languages). The Indian Constitution of 1950 declared Hindi as the sole official language, with English being used only temporarily for a 15-year transitional period. A number of politicians who pushed for this clause did see phasing out English as part of the decolonization process.

But it's true that English usage alongside Hindi as co-official has been extended indefinitely due to non-Hindi-speaking regions preferring to use English over Hindi when dealing with the central government. The Constitution was amended in 1967 to remove the phase-out period, partly in response to some riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Hindi_agitations_of_Tamil...

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