Comment on Everyday, as an American

<- View Parent
Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

You’re confusing what your own familiarity and experience with a general human rule.

My mother tongue (Portuguese) has the same order when saying numbers as English (i.e. twenty seven) and indeed when I learned Dutch it was jarring that their number order is the reverse (i.e. seven and twenty) until I got used to it, by which point it stopped being jarring.

The brain doesn’t really care beyond “this is not how I’m used to parse numbers” and once you get used to do it that way, it works just as well.

As for dates, people using year first is jarring to me, because I grew up hearing day first then month, then year. There is only one advantage for year first, which is very specifically when in text form, sorting by text dates written in year-month-day order will correctly sort by date, which is nice if you’re a programmer (and the reason why when I need to have a date as part of a filename I’ll user year first). Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don’t need to say the rest since if you don’t it’s implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now “let’s have that meeting on the 10” June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date, for future refernce you have to write the whole thing anyway)

Personally I recognize that it’s mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don’t think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.

source
Sort:hotnewtop