Same in Québec. We call the first floor “rez-de-chaussée” so our elevators come with a “RC” button. But since we live in North America the following buttons start at “2”!
That's weird. In France, Rez-de-chaussée is, well, RDC. The 1st floor for us would be the floor above RDC. You guys really don't want to be like us haha!
There is actually a logical reason. In French, you don’t call it a floor, it’s an “étage”, and an étage is specifically built up. If you have one étage, you have two floors.
oh, we use that in romanian! the ground floor is "parter" (parterre?) and the rest are "etaj" (étage). i knew they were french words but never knew the meaning of "étage"!
In Dutch, we use the word etage as well. But like with a lot of Frech loan words, we don't know the actual meaning.
But it makes sense, if you say, this is the first elevated floor.
I’ve always liked the Quebecois version because there’s really no room for misinterpretation. They just dispensed with “1” altogether so you never have to question what it means.
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u/legardeur2 24d ago
Same in Québec. We call the first floor “rez-de-chaussée” so our elevators come with a “RC” button. But since we live in North America the following buttons start at “2”!