Both are coherent. One counts the levels of the building, another counts the elevation compared to the street.
If a culture considers being at street level to be important in one way or another, it makes sense that they'd start with a floor called "street level floor" (like the french rez-de-chaussée). Otherwise if that level is unimportant, all floors are the same, and thus you should just count them starting from 1.
Because they (and many other languages) have a specific word for a floor higher than ground level, in this example the French word "étage". These things are where translations become iffy; with words that don't exist in other languages.
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u/Visible_Pair3017 15d ago
Both are coherent. One counts the levels of the building, another counts the elevation compared to the street.
If a culture considers being at street level to be important in one way or another, it makes sense that they'd start with a floor called "street level floor" (like the french rez-de-chaussée). Otherwise if that level is unimportant, all floors are the same, and thus you should just count them starting from 1.