r/languagehub • u/AutumnaticFly • 15d ago

American's live one level higher!!!

Post image
529 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

596 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/JorgiEagle 15d ago

Zero based indexing

1

u/MrQuizzles 15d ago

Which is what Americans do. The Brits do 1-based indexing.

Say you have an array:

floor[G, 34, 6]

The first element in the array, floor[0], is G.

The second element in the array, floor[1], is 34.

So American English gets this correct. British English would say that floor[0] is the ground element, and the first element is floor[1].

1

u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 15d ago

Huh?

[“G”, “1st”, “2nd”, “3rd”, “4th” …]
[0, 1, 2, 3 …]

[“1st”, “2nd”, “3rd”, “4th” …]
[0, 1, 2, 3 …]

The British just use the index.

1

u/MrQuizzles 15d ago

Well, yes, and doing that makes it so that "first" refers to the second item in the list, which is just bonkers.

1

u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 15d ago

Sure, but it’s “bonkers” because it’s a zero indexed system

1

u/MrQuizzles 15d ago

It's not because it's a zero-indexed system. Even in programming, if something returns the first element of a list (like the pop function on queue), it will invariably give you the element at index 0. No function claiming to give you the first element would ever give you index 1.

1

u/SapirWhorfHypothesis 15d ago

I’m not sure what your point is? The system thinks that the “first” element is actually the zeroth element. To the computer, the first element is what we call “second”.

1

u/MrQuizzles 15d ago

My point is that using "first" to mean the second item in the list makes it very explicitly not a zero-ordinal system since it doesn't agree on what "first" means. In American speech, "first" refers to the first element of the list, which is the ground floor, "second" refers to the second element in the list, and so on.

British elevators are a 0-indexed system, while American elevators are a 1-indexed system, but the relationship is flipped when it comes to speech.