221–230 of 449 posts
Pick your battles. Is this easier or harder to win on than de-gendering romance languages? How about Americans stop with dropping the "and" in nineteen hundred AND twenty?
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That's what most people think and the world keeps trucking along. It's the rare people that don't who actually change the world.
You can change the world if you make it easier to meet a need enough people have. Persuading everyone they're holding it wrong is not that.
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I don't think it is a mistake for Lua. The convention to zero-index arrays is not sacrosanct, it's just the way older languages did it (due to implementation details) and thus how people continue to do it. But it's very counter-intuitive, and I think it's fair game for new languages to challenge assumptions that we hold because we're used to past languages.
It's not counter-intuitive at all, it only seems that way because people are now used to languages with zero-based indexing. That's almost entirely because of the C language, which used pointer offset arithmetic with its arrays. Outside of that machine context, where an array is a contiguous block of RAM that can be indexed with memory pointers, there's no particular reason to do offset indexing. 1-based works just f…
> The issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201. There’s a simple solution. Avoid saying “the 18th century”, and say “the 1700s” instead. Besides being easier to understand, it’s also slightly shorter. The kind of person who cares and reads about "the Xth century" can also trivially understand the date range involved. The k…
It's funny that for me it feels right to associate the 20s with 2020 and the 40s with 1940, but somehow, the 30s is very foreign, and I can't think of 1930 or 2030 either.
Funny, when you say "20s" I think of the 1920s (aka the "Roaring 20s" here in the US). I wonder if it's an age thing (I'm in my 40s), or perhaps a cultural or regional thing. The 30s as 1930s seems pretty solid to me: US Great Depression, start of WWII, not to mention many of the smaller conflicts that led up to it.
What is odd is that I never feel the need to refer to the 00s. I've never said "naughties" or anything else. In the 90s, people already talked about the 80s, but for me it's all been pretty much the same since the 00s. I don't even know what I'd talk about from the 00s. The music? 2001 by Dr. Dre came out in 1999. It could have been made today. Fight Club was 1999. Could have been made today. The fashion? People have straight hair and wear t-shirts still today.
> This leaves ambiguous how to refer to decades like 1800-1809. There is the apostrophe convention for decades. You can refer to the decade of 1800–1809 as "the '00s" when the century is clear from the context. ( The Chicago Manual of Style allows it: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/299512 .) If you wanted to upset people, you could try adding the century back: "the 18'00s". :-) There is also the convention of re…
I think this is incorrect. Don't centuries start with the 00? In that case the first year of a century is 0, and the 76th year would be 75, not 76 as the author writes: > starting in 1776, not in the 76th year of the 18th century.
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Just to make sure I understood this, that would be used as "17th settecento" to mean 1700s right? (This Xth century business always bothered and genuinely confused me to no end and everyone always dismissed my objections that it's a confusing thing to say. I'm a bit surprised, but also relieved, to see this thread exists. Yes, please, kill all off-by-one century business in favor of 1700s and 17th settecento or anyth…
"settecento" can be read as "seven hundred" in Italian; gramps is proposing to use a more specific word as a tag for Italian art from the 1700s. Of course, 700 is not 1700, hence the "drop 1000 years". The prefix seventeen in Italian is "diciassette-" so perhaps "diciasettecento" would be more accurate for the 1700s. (settecento is shorter, though.) Hope this clarifies. Not to miss the forest for the trees, to reiter…
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The American and French Revolutions are a pretty big deal on the road to modern democracy, as well as being tied to 1700s Enlightenment ideals. Everyone educated should know this.
No one that I know of in Europe gets taught this
I would be extremely surprised if Sweden was unique among European nations in this regard.
> The issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201. There’s a simple solution. Avoid saying “the 18th century”, and say “the 1700s” instead. Besides being easier to understand, it’s also slightly shorter. The kind of person who cares and reads about "the Xth century" can also trivially understand the date range involved. The k…
Second, your implicit premise is likely wrong. Different people have different talents and different challenges. Concrete example: In German we say eight-and-fighty for 58. Thus 32798 gets two-and-three-thirty-seven-hundred-eight-and-ninety where you constantly switch between higher and lower valued digits. There are many people, me included that not-seldomly produce "Zahlendreher" – transposed digits – because of that, when writing those numbers down from hearing alone, e.g. 32789. But then, there are also people for whom this is so much of a non-issue that when they dictate telephone numbers they read it in groups of two: 0172 346578 becomes zero-one-seven-two-four-and-thirty-five-and-sixty-eight-and-seventy. For me this is hell, because when I listen to these numbers I need to constantly switch them around in my head with active attention. Yet others don't even think about it and value the useful grouping it does. My current thesis is that it is because of a difference between auditory and visual perception. When they hear four-and-thirty they see 34 in their head, whereas I parse the auditory information purely auditory.
What I want you to take from my example, is that these issue might not be training problems alone. I have learned the German number spelling from birth and have worked in number intensive field and yet I continue to have these challenges. While I have not been deeply into history, I suspect that my troubles with Xth century versus x-hundreds might persist, or persist for a long time, even if I get more involved in the field.