Re: The English/French counting system (WAS: number systems from conlangs)
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, September 15, 2003, 21:58 |
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On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 05:16:27PM -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
> I had absolutely no idea that the British used "half eight"
> to mean "half past eight."
You and me both, until recently. :)
> I also had no idea that German had the same idiom for it that Danish does.
Danish, German . . . it's all Dutch, right? ;)
> But once you started getting into expressions like "fem minuter i
> halv otte" "five minutes in half eight" and "fem minuter over halv otte"
> "five minutes over half eight" for 7:25 and 7:35 respectively, I thought it
> was getting to be a bit too much.
I'll agree with your assessment. Just count the minutes already!
Next I suppose we'll be going back to the Roman method of counting
the date - or heck, why stop there with the subtractive principle?
I can give my birthdate as "the third day before the Nones of the
third month before the second half of the third year before the
third decade before the end of the 20th century."
> The one that made me show up at the wrong time, though, was trying to
> function on a 24-hour clock, which I had never had to do before.
Ah, well, as a military brat I learned the 24-hour clock at a tender
age, and I actually prefer it to the 12-hour variety. But I'm
admittedly a freak in that department; the 12-hour clock is just
one of several timekeeping idiosyncracies that I'd just as soon do
without, including daylight savings time and time zones in general.
I mean, as long as my boss and I agree on what time I'm supposed to
show up for a meeting (which is admittedly an open question if it's
at half [past] the hour :) ), does it really matter if we call it
2:30 PM EDT, 1330 EST, or 1830 UTC? Who cares if the sun is at
high noon at 0600 in the summer and 0700 in the winter instead of
at 1200 year round? Clock time is just an arbitrary label and it's
past time we got rid of its archaic chaining to the position
of the sun in the local sky.
Hm. Guess I needed <rant>...</rant> tags around that. Sorry. :)
-Mark
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