Re: OT: announcement

Quoting Douglas Koller <laokou@...>:

> From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
>
> > I agree, the day starts when I get up and ends when I go to sleep; if
> > I don't to go to sleep on a given night, the sunrise starts the next
> > day.
>
> > Still, there is a good reason for having the civil day start at
> > midnight: the time period from noon to noon (and hence also the one
> > from midnight to midnight) has the most consistent length throughout
> > the year.  You get much wider variation in the sunrise-to-sunrise and
> > sunset-to-sunset periods.
>
> I've lost control of this one. I coined some words, which I thought were
> based on a Swedish concept I thought was cool. I've forgotten the Swedish
> words, but "day" and "night" were gelatinous (there are Swedish words for
> "day" and "night", obviously) and I thought that'd be extra-cool to
> incorporate that with Japanese "-haku", a measure for overnight stays at
> hotels. Still, Géarthnuns "ntins" seems to be just "AM" and "dhners," "PM."
> Swedes, does any of this ring familiar?
Not particularly. The Swedish words for "day" and "night" are _dag_ and _natt_,
respectively, the former sharing its English gloss's ambiguity between "daylight
period" and "24h period". There is also _dygn_ meaning a 24 period: day and
night. When using the 12h clock, we distinguish, if needed, between AM and PM by
unsystematically appending "in the night", "in the morning" etc. I don't see how
any of this is more 'gelatinous' than the English usage.

                                   Andreas