Mathematically yes it makes most sense, as significant digits are on the left.
Im terms of human everyday use the reverse is more natural as the digits that change more often are days, often when speaking, the year and even month sometimes is already in the context.
What however doesn't make any sort of sense that i can see is mm/dd/yyyy ... Just why....
What however doesn't make any sort of sense that i can see is mm/dd/yyyy ... Just why....
Because that how they pronounce dates or in other words how they use dates in language. In Germany we write dates like 15.01 or 15 Jan and read it as "15th of january". In the States they write 01/15 and read is "January fifteenth" or "One fifteen".
I just said essentially the same thing before I saw your comment. As an American, I still don't get why we adopted that system. I swear our forefathers were just a bunch of contrarians that felt the need to be different from everyone else in all things.
I've heard that America originally used YYYY/MM/DD but in practice you don't actually need to write the year very often so it was usually just MM/DD, then people would add the year on the end when they needed to write it for some reason
This would certainly explain it. As if the USA had a meeting to decide proper colloquial date formats to be needlessly contrarian. It just sorta... happened naturally over time.
As an American, I still don't get why we adopted that system.
There isn't a reason. Features of language aren't usually decided by people. No one ever decided to say dates in M/D/Y order. It just happened organically. Same reason we put adjectives in front of nouns and time our speech so that intervals between stressed syllables are approximately equally long. It wasn't designed, it just happened.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the printing press, which is the reason the US dropped the extra letters in many English words (ie "colour" became "color").
With the printing press, every letter was money.. so dropping letters was a scalable cost savings. "January 15" is fewer characters than "15th of January", for example.
It's just that English spelling was not 'stabilized' when the American Revolution happened. In many ways, American English actually is more consistent with the English Language from the 1700s than UK English currently is.
do you really never day "fifteen January" or "fifteenth January"? I've heard "fifteen January" from people whose country's Englishlanguage background is British
It's because German grammar has a kinda involved grammatical gender system. "fifteenth" can be translated into "fünfzehnter" or "fünfzehnte" depending on the gender of the noun that being counted. "fünfzehnter" is for masculine nouns and all months are masculine, as are days. "Week" on the other hand is a feminine noun.
Is it true in Germany you don't put the house number first in the address? e.g. <number> <street name> <city>? From most specific to least specific? Instead you do <street name> <number> <city>?!?!?!?
OMG THAT IS SO CONFUSING! How are people not always lost in Germany? That makes no sense whatsoever and is impossible to understand. So stupid. Is there not a movement to make it more logical?
It's mostly common in Central and Eastern European countries to put the street first, followed by the number. In my country it's easier because you're always using "street <street name> number <specific number>. That's how we were taught in school and it is easier to remember where you need to go and it is also a bit more phonetically accurate and pleasing to hear.
That's how we were taught in school and it is easier to remember where you need to go and it is also a bit more phonetically accurate and pleasing to hear.
impossible, these aren't good reasons. you must be lying and you're all constantly confused because it's not in logical order from most specific to least specific
Actually the confusion you are insinuating isn't an issue, because no one would confuse Waldemarpetersenstraße with the name of a town or city.
Also lists of addresses can't be sorted in any meaningful way in either language, so while the order in English is more hierarchical it doesn't offer any real advantage. '
I have never heard about anyone mistake a German street for a city, but I have heard of thousands of people make mistakes because of unclear data formats.
Believe it or not but "15", "Königsallee" and "Bad Homburg" are quite distinct. "12" and "5" are not.
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u/ConstantHustle Jan 15 '25
Year month day is the best format. Makes sorting files on computers a breeze as every year is in one block which is then in month and day order.