Re: YYMMDD (was: Re: Laadan)

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à bnathyuw <bnathyuw@...>:
>
> >
> > what ? like writing today as 18xii2002 ? i usually do
> > that as i don't like punctuating numbers (?!) if it's
> > long tho i would write 2002 12 18 0946 . . . !
>
>No, I was referring to the use of ordinals for days and cardinals for
>years,
>although they in both case refer to a rank! After all, originally years
>were
>counted using ordinals, and it is this change from ordinals to cardinals
>that
>brought this nonsense discussion about whether the first year of the 21th
>century was in 2000 or 2001 :) . If we had carried on using ordinals, the
>question would never have been there, because no sane person would have
>ever
>claimed that there was a "zeroth" year ;)))) .
I thought you were some kind of engineer? Here at least, jokes about how an
engineer's ordinals are "zeroth", "oneth", "twoth", "threeth", "fourth" etc
are quite common.

Similarly, one of the tell-tale signs to distinguish scientists from
technologists is that the former start numbering things on "one", the latter
on "zero". (Another is that scientist think that the area of a circle is pi
times the radius squared, whereas technologists think it is pi times the
diametre squared through four.)

Obconlang: The Tairezan word for "zeroth" is _dhaik_. Slightly irregular
ordinal-formation from _dhaig_ "zero"; you'd expect **_dhaigek_ but there
are quite a few instances where what should be _-gek_ or _-kek_ comes out as
simply _-k_.


                                                                    Andreas

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