Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

In Sweden we say 20th June, 2022 and we even use a "DD/MM -YY" shorthand when signing documents for instance, although YYYY-MM-DD is also common and "the more correct".

Denmark: The Nth $month $year. E.g., “Den 20. juni 2022” (lit.: the 20th June 2022).

It does vary by language, but Roman languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) say the 4th of July.

Same in German.

In Polish, it’s the same, except for official matters since 2002, which now follows ISO8601.

Even in the UK they commonly say the 5th of May, and not May, the 5th (but it does happen).

I can’t talk about other languages.

European here. When I state my date of birth I state it as “7th of October 1990”.

When a date is within the current year I state it as for example “27th of June”.

If weekday matters, and specific date is still relevant I’ll say for example “Monday 27th of June”.

I might also simply say “Sunday last week”, “Monday next week”, “Monday at the end of next month”, etc.

Likewise I might say “a couple of weeks ago”, “last week”, “a few days ago”, “in under two weeks”, etc.

Depends on context.

When including a date in a file name I prefer YYYY-MM-DD for date.

When using dates in a directory hierarchy I’ll have years on the top level, with months within them and dates within those.

Sometimes I might use a format like YYYY-mm-ddTHHMMz_s in a file name. For example “something_2022-06-20T1722+0000_1655745728_more_text.tbz”

These replies are fascinating. When saying a date I always say month day year. I hadn’t considered that this might be cultural.

In German, Dutch I'll use "twenty June twenty-twentytwo". In English "twentieth of June twenty-twentytwo

It varies by context: sometimes I'll say "20th June", sometimes "June 20th". There's no rhyme or reason.

There isn’t a standard. Most individuals don’t have a consistent standard, let alone languages.

Germanic (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) languages just say "10 october", they'd never say "October 10th". Before we get our 'english is so stupid!!!' hat on, in many of these (e.g. Dutch and German), the number '87' is pronounced 'seven-and-eighty' ('zevenentachtig' - 'zeven en tachtig' - seven and eighty), which is stupid. Languages are weird).

Same for the romance ones: It's just "Quatorze juillet" - 14th of July (Bastille day).

English is the weird one, but not that weird, "7th of october" is not much more complicated to say than "October 7th".

In portuguese people say "vinte de junho de dois mil e vinte dois", meaning "twenty of june of two thousand twenty two". The first few days of the month are ordinal: people say "primeiro de janeiro" meaning "first of january".

Japanese uses a neat system akin to YYYY-MM-DD. 2022-06-20 becomes ２０２１年６月２０日 meaning "2021 year 6 month 20 day". Really nice to read. Actual pronunciation is very irregular though, especially days of the month where about half of them are irregular.

> Out of curiosity, in what order do Europeans verbally say full dates with month names? Or does it vary by language?

I am from India and I say "21st of June 2022"

I really hate watching historical documentaries where they spell out dates with day->month->year. If the intention is to teach, then the year is most important number and all other information is to be catalogued in context of broadest time period. The DD-MM-YYYY forces viewers to keep the whole date in their heads before it can be parsed and understood.

The "Algorithms to Live By" book has a good name for this: computational kindness. We should strive to reduce cognitive burden. The bigger the audience, the more effort should go into making data digestible. Unfortunately the established date standard goes against it.

The other problem is mixing endianness: the date information uses little endian, while numbers themselves are spelled out in big endian. The American MM-DD-YYYY on the other hand... I don't know what they were thinking.

The one difference by language is the day: some languages say 1st or 7th, some just 1 or 7. In mine, except for 1st we use the day number, full reading is "day month, year" where the comma is a small extra space.

Verbally in the same order as written in BrE - 22 June. (Historically '22nd inst. [instant]'.)

'June twenty-second' ordering verbally is as distanctly American (not to say you don't hear it, as with many Americanizms) as it is in writing.