71–80 of 109 posts
What a pain. We really should just declared the year to be 360 days long, with 12 months, 30 days each, split into 6 day long weeks. The extra 5 days? Everybody take a vacation. Leap days go in there too somehow. Every month starts with a Monday and ends with a Sunday. Wednesday will be removed because it was no good anyway.
This is very similar to the method I use and, after conversation with him, the method Art Benjamin uses. It's trivial to do in 10 to 15 seconds, though it requires practice, a very small amount of memorisation[0], and a small amount of mental arithmetic. I use it regularly, partly to keep in practice, and partly because once you have the skill you find it's surprisingly useful. JH Conway used a different technique[1]…
That's a helpful encoding because it matches up with numbering that's routinely used in Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, and by Quakers, among many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#...
These are mostly ultimately because of the Hebrew Bible account in which Sunday is the first day of creation (e.g. Genesis 1:5, 1:8, 1:13, ...).
Reading the article, I wandered into the difference of Old Style and New Style dates and what happened in 1752. From [1]: By the 18th century, the English legal year – used for legal, financial and other civil purposes – had for centuries begun on 25 March, or Lady Day.[13][i] Thus, for example, 24 March 1707 was immediately followed by 25 March 1708, while the day following 31 December 1708 was 1 January 1708, with…
I just typed "cal 1752" and got a calendar with a September that has no dates between Wednesday the 2nd and Thursday the 14th. Although disputed by some, apparently the switch to the Gregorian calendar is also the basis for "April Fools' Day." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
Maybe a better (or much worse!) behavior would be to show the switch in the current locale, so in ru_RU it happens in 1918, but in es_ES (or es_MX, es_CO, es_AR, es_PY, ...) it happens in 1582.
This is very similar to the method I use and, after conversation with him, the method Art Benjamin uses. It's trivial to do in 10 to 15 seconds, though it requires practice, a very small amount of memorisation[0], and a small amount of mental arithmetic. I use it regularly, partly to keep in practice, and partly because once you have the skill you find it's surprisingly useful. JH Conway used a different technique[1]…
> Then Sunday=1, Wednesday=4, etc. That's a helpful encoding because it matches up with numbering that's routinely used in Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, and by Quakers, among many others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#... These are mostly ultimately because of the Hebrew Bible account in which Sunday is the first day of creation (e.g. Genesis 1:5, 1:8, 1:13, ...).
Sunday is the day of creation in the Bible because it was the first day in the calendar being used where Genesis was written and translated, so "Day 1" became "Sunday" because to the translator "Sunday" was the first day. That calendar itself was not mathematical - the Hebrew calendar was an empirical lunisolar calendar with arbitrary intercalarion for thousands of years until it was fixed in 2CE in Judea, and it took another thousand years for this practice to become consensus, so Sunday being the day of creation is purely incidental and not a necessary intersection.
Ascribing the Bible into it is gratuitous and useless. While it might be a reason why a small proportion Christians use it, it only explains a tiny minority of its usage, not most of it. It's just explained by it being an obvious way to name days.
This is very similar to the method I use and, after conversation with him, the method Art Benjamin uses. It's trivial to do in 10 to 15 seconds, though it requires practice, a very small amount of memorisation[0], and a small amount of mental arithmetic. I use it regularly, partly to keep in practice, and partly because once you have the skill you find it's surprisingly useful. JH Conway used a different technique[1]…
This is very similar to the method I use and, after conversation with him, the method Art Benjamin uses. It's trivial to do in 10 to 15 seconds, though it requires practice, a very small amount of memorisation[0], and a small amount of mental arithmetic. I use it regularly, partly to keep in practice, and partly because once you have the skill you find it's surprisingly useful. JH Conway used a different technique[1]…
This is very similar to the method I use and, after conversation with him, the method Art Benjamin uses. It's trivial to do in 10 to 15 seconds, though it requires practice, a very small amount of memorisation[0], and a small amount of mental arithmetic. I use it regularly, partly to keep in practice, and partly because once you have the skill you find it's surprisingly useful. JH Conway used a different technique[1]…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some reason part participles are particularly hard for me too (native English speaker who speaks no other languages fluently). (they must just be a mess in English? I can't imagine how non-native speakers ever get any of them) I'm going to go with swutcheted
English verbs are pretty tame compared to Slavic verbs that can be modified with all kinds of perfective prefixes. On the other hand, Chinese verbs are even easier. They don't even have a tense!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
English verbs are pretty tame compared to Slavic verbs that can be modified with all kinds of perfective prefixes. On the other hand, Chinese verbs are even easier. They don't even have a tense!
I wouldn’t say that Chinese verbs have no tense so much as that they are uninflected and that tense is marked with particles (which admittedly do not cause difficulties with irregular infexions).
However, the verbs themselves don't have tense. So these sentences can be identical: "I will walk home, then I will eat a cake" and "I walked home, then I ate a cake".
The overall timeframe can be given by a larger context: "Once my shift is over, I ..." / "I drank too much yesterday, that's all I remember: ".
It's simply not possible in English because every verb has a grammar tense built into it.