I love the term "middle endianness" and how clearly it highlights how nuts the American date notation is.
EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.
EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.
I don't have to remember the exact symbol for 2,020 in Roman numerals, because I can figure it out. In fact, I have no idea what it would be without sitting down and doing so.
I'm not saying it would be a good system, but it could be usable by mere mortals. I guess you could debate if this would really be "10,000 unique symbols" or just something akin to our current writing system for numbers.
When order matters, you invariably want big-endian notation, which is why that notation is acceptable everywhere regardless of the usual native notation. But by the same token, it means that all other styles are equally "nuts". European day-month-year notation doesn't have any technical advantages over month-day-year.
Interesting. We (Australian) say "Second of Feb, 2020". ;)
12/25 is often called Christmas, and yet 9/29 is never called Michaelmas. Same thing.
But one of their biggest holidays is explicitly called "4th of July", changing the ordering.
"4th of July" is not a method that Americans couldn't use if they wanted to, but it is an ossified usage that doesn't reflect how Americans generally refer to dates. Like Christmas, it is a proper name of limited evidentiary value.
This might help explain how Santa delivers all those presents in "one night".
Calling Christmas Eve "Christmas" is not common at all.
...and then the very next day, without adult supervision, you started saying your dates weirdly and dropping the “u”s out of words, stuff like that.*
* DISCLAIMER: May not be an accurate representation of history. :P
True, but nowadays we say "Independence Day" :-)
Starting with the most general and ending with the most specific is a logical order. Doing it the other way round is also logical. But starting with the middle makes no sense.
It doesn’t seem unusual to you because you use it often.
That said I’m German and I realize that German postal addresses are crazy for the same reason. I wish we‘d adopt the Chinese format: country first then province (state), then County then town then neighborhood then street and house.
German addresses are middle endian: street then house number then zip code then city then country. The right order seems to be: city, zip, street, house number. Most general to most specific.
The broadest unit that is likely to change going first makes sense.
1. Exact street location (street + house)
2. District (postal code)
3. City
4. Country
Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over country and city names every time before reaching the bit they actually need.
A more "logical" notation, as per the gp's comment would start:
1. Exact street location (house + street)
Street_name street_number/house_number
Postal_code, City, Country
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA
Of course that's arguable, as postcode shouldn't really be considered a component of-, rather an alternative to- other sections of the address.
1. name of recipient, 2. town name, 3. street address or post box number, 4. four digit postal code.
(I have a vague memory of seeing that sort of order in German, too, in a historical context, but perhaps it was from Austria-Hungary.)
The english language—and every other real-world spoken language—is full of rules and exceptions that make absolutely zero logical sense. How far down this road do you want to go?
As long as we speak in a specific order, I don't think it's crazy at all to write in that same order. After all, normal written sentences follow the spoken order of words, too.
This matches why almost every country in the world uses “d/m/y” in normal usage.
Standard Chinese for example uses Y/M/D and I’m sure you can find many examples of other formats.
Several countries write a short data as M/D/Y, but these mostly have a significant American influence.
It wasn't "almost every country in the world doesn't use m/d/y", even if you would have liked it to be.
I speak English English.
Afaik all Germanic languages except English¹ (and close relatives) have the same thing. Ie this stuff is the same in Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish², etc.
We don't say "Twenty-three" but "Three-and-twenty". So far so good, but we do the hundreds, thousands etc just like English does. Thus, 123 is pronounced "hundred-three-and-twenty", i.e. precisely as nuts as what Americans do with dates.
¹) I assume that English fixed this at some point along the way (maybe due to French influences?), because the special number names between 10 and 20 do follow continental Germanic rules, eg compare "sixteen" and "twenty-one". We mainland Europeans like to mock the English speaking world for their insane unit systems, but at least their numbers make sense.
²) Danish has it worse. They have the same insane number ordering plus insane number names.
3 is "tre", 30 is "tredive". 4 is "fire", 40 is "fyrre". So far so good. Like in many languages, 10x sounds a bit like x.
But 6 is "seks", and 60 is "treds" (!). To make matters worse, 5 is "fem" but 50 is.. "halvtreds" (!!). Similarly 9 is "ni" and 90 is "halvfems". In Danish, for x <= 5 < 10, 10x sounds like ["", "halv"][x mod 2] + ceil(x / 20). I tried mocking the language by saying "fems" instead of "hundrede" but I just got blank stares.
And I'm lucky enough to have grown up on the same insane middle endianness as the Danes. I can't imagine how impossible Danish numbers must be to learn for eg an English speaker. Every time my wife says a number in Danish I spend half a minute doing the math, "she said something with 'tre' in it, so threes, but it ended with an s, so three times twenty, oh but wait there was 'halv' in front of it so subtract 10, ah, fifty". But she didn't say that, she said "to-hundrede-tre-og-halvtreds". By the time I'm done with the math I already forgot the other digits :-)
Swedish and Norwegian (and English for that matter) used to count the Germanic way, but swapped to the modern way for 20 onwards at various points.
There's an English nursery rhyme "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" which has the old way as its title. English also used to use the vigesimal system. My great-grandfather was supposedly a bit of a traditionalist even amongst his rural friends, who poked fun at him for saying things like "two score nine? I'm not paying that!".
Middle Endian dates make sense when the season something happens in is important.
“When’s your birthday? 10/23. When are we going to Ma’s? 11/19 thru 11/29. When do you go back into therapy? 12/8.”
As it could be written in English in Britain, Australia etc.
23/10 is pronounced "23rd of October" or (usually) "23rd'f October" or "23rd'f the 10th".
The range is "19th to 29th of November" or "... of the 11th".
The pronunciation "second of the second twenty-twenty" is usually used when the listener is writing, typing or confirming the date in figures.
Similarly the Sexagesimal notation, in common use (clocks etc), points to an generalization that would have been much better than the French system, where we rely on primes for increasing places in the number. Eg 4321(primal) would be 4x5 + 3x3 + 2x2 +1x1 = 34(decimal). Historically we may be stuck with counting on our fingers and toes though, through eternity.
The more "logical" Metric system which is not an extension of the "practical" Imperial system is inevitably bastardized and Creoled in everyday usage. Eg one buys a "Pound Plus" of Chocolate from Trader Joe's (500 grams!). Why is the choice is not one (or fice) Hectogram(s) vs one Kilogram i do not know... except that Hectogram is so obtuse/abstruse i had to google it! Maybe someone in a Metric country can correct me, if they think i am wrong using words like abstruse. One inevitably finds doubling and halving in everyday commerce.
We would do a lot better to extend to tripling, quintupling etc, like the Babylonians did, than directly to the (insane, in my opinion :-) French 10x Metric system.
Not that i am an American chauvinist. Eg i think the American middle endianistic dating system is off the wall weird, and i go out of my way to circumvent it.
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/are_numbers...
https://www.livescience.com/15859-odd-numbers-male-female.ht...