Re: YYMMDD (was: Re: Laadan)

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> I didn't work on how Maggel treats dates, but I do know that it uses ordinal
> numbers rather than cardinal numbers for day and year numbers
I could see going either way with year numbers; however, in some languages
large ordinals are rarely used and sometimes uncertain (the ordinal of
1001 is properly "the thousand and first" but "the thousand and one-th"
is often heard).  Using cardinals for days of the month seems utterly
bizarre to me:  "Dec 25" is "December twenty-fifth", being short for
"the twenty-fifth [day] of December".  This older form is lexicalized
in "the Fourth of July".

I once saw a parody of French political speeches which read something
like this:

        We must at all times be inspired with the spirit of May 25, while
        not forgetting the significant lessons of April 9, nor neglecting
        the spirit of December 18, ...

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
"If he has seen farther than others,
        it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves."
                --Mike Champion, describing Tim Berners-Lee (adapted)

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