Little endian notation is somewhat mixed endian itself, because it contains 3 numbers, each number by itself is big endian, but the 3 numbers are arranged in little endian fashion amongst each other.
If each unique symbol for a number was made up of smaller symbols arranged using a simple algorithm you wouldn't necessarily need to memorize them all. Kind of like Roman numerals, but much a bit more complex.
I don't have to remember the exact symbol for 2,020 in Roman numerals, because I can figure it out. In fact, I have no idea what it would be without sitting down and doing so.
I'm not saying it would be a good system, but it could be usable by mere mortals. I guess you could debate if this would really be "10,000 unique symbols" or just something akin to our current writing system for numbers.
The American date notation is simply a direct reflection of the spoken language. We say "February second, 2020" and we write "2/2/2020". (Contra the root comment, I can't agree that 2/2/2020 is a palindrome.) I don't see this as being crazy or even unusual.
When order matters, you invariably want big-endian notation, which is why that notation is acceptable everywhere regardless of the usual native notation. But by the same token, it means that all other styles are equally "nuts". European day-month-year notation doesn't have any technical advantages over month-day-year.
That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.
Starting with the most general and ending with the most specific is a logical order. Doing it the other way round is also logical. But starting with the middle makes no sense.
It doesn’t seem unusual to you because you use it often.
That said I’m German and I realize that German postal addresses are crazy for the same reason. I wish we‘d adopt the Chinese format: country first then province (state), then County then town then neighborhood then street and house.
German addresses are middle endian: street then house number then zip code then city then country. The right order seems to be: city, zip, street, house number. Most general to most specific.
What's so crazy about the German notation? Seems to make perfect sense, as it goes line-by-line from the smallest to the largest sorting unit:
1. Exact street location (street + house)
2. District (postal code)
3. City
4. Country
Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over country and city names every time before reaching the bit they actually need.
You're thinking of street and house number as two things. Germans don't. Or at least I don't. Your approach makes as much sense as picking movie titles with numbers at the end apart into two things.
Street and house number are certainly two different things. It's more like series of movies (Die Hard 1, Die Hard 2, etc. are different movies but part of the same series. In the same way, a street could be seen as a series of houses or addresses. So the smallest unit is the house, then the street.
The typical English-influenced way to do it starts with the number,the most specific thing.
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA
(The postcode is least-specific first: SW is South West London, 1 is the district nearest Central London, and the 2 would usually be a few streets and the AA 5-10 houses, but this is a unique code for an address that gets a lot of post.)
Funnily enough, with the addition of the newest element to that format — the postcode — to the end, this format also becomes less "logical", postcode being very specific.
Of course that's arguable, as postcode shouldn't really be considered a component of-, rather an alternative to- other sections of the address.
A postcode (or local equivalent) isn't necessarily particularly specific. For example, here in Austria the equivalent of a postcode might cover a whole city district.
You are missing the name of the house resident as the first line. Once I had my mail returned to the sender because my parents-in-law did not put our name on the envelope.
For something like addresses, usage pattern is going to matter... if most mail is sent within the city, then putting street first makes sense, because the city is almost always the same; it shouldn't take up valuable real estate at the front of the address.
The broadest unit that is likely to change going first makes sense.
> That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.
The english language—and every other real-world spoken language—is full of rules and exceptions that make absolutely zero logical sense. How far down this road do you want to go?
As long as we speak in a specific order, I don't think it's crazy at all to write in that same order. After all, normal written sentences follow the spoken order of words, too.
It's more accurate than it might sound. If I recall correctly, the American spelling reforms were largely a one-man top-down effort driven by the ideological goal of being more separate from Britain.
You can say any date like that in American English, it’s just less common. “Today is the second of February” sounds perfectly natural, but I’d be more likely to say “Today is February second”.
And a proper name is not good evidence of normal usage. "Christmas" is normal use in an older, Catholic method of identifying calendar dates. Americans don't use that method; most couldn't if they wanted to. But Christmas itself is still identified that way for historical reasons -- the word has gone from being an example of talking about the calendar to being an example of a proper name.
"4th of July" is not a method that Americans couldn't use if they wanted to, but it is an ossified usage that doesn't reflect how Americans generally refer to dates. Like Christmas, it is a proper name of limited evidentiary value.
Possibly it's the difference between being an atheist and a catholic, since I faintly remember my catholic friends receiving presents on the morning of the 25th, while I would receive them on the evening of the 24th.
I would agree that there's influence in both directions between the written pattern and the usual manner of speech. All I'm saying here is that there's nothing surprising about the written pattern matching the usual manner of speech. That is the primary purpose of writing; it's weirder for the writing not to match the speech. (Although certainly not unheard of; it is the norm in e.g. Chinese.)
Idiosyncratic? Of course. People in different countries speak differently. Every natural language is totally arbitrary and “idiosyncratic”. What is your point?
The assertion that most people and most countries in spoken language say “day [of] month”, which I find anecdotally accurate, although that’s mainly in European countries and languages
This matches why almost every country in the world uses “d/m/y” in normal usage.
If you were aware of the mind-boggling diversity of human language you would not make claims like “typical languages do X so one that doesn’t is idiosyncratic” (unless backed by serious research spanning the thousands of known languages). You would also not think experience with a few languages from the Indo-European family is generalizable.
Standard Chinese for example uses Y/M/D and I’m sure you can find many examples of other formats.
Afaik all Germanic languages except English¹ (and close relatives) have the same thing. Ie this stuff is the same in Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish², etc.
We don't say "Twenty-three" but "Three-and-twenty". So far so good, but we do the hundreds, thousands etc just like English does. Thus, 123 is pronounced "hundred-three-and-twenty", i.e. precisely as nuts as what Americans do with dates.
¹) I assume that English fixed this at some point along the way (maybe due to French influences?), because the special number names between 10 and 20 do follow continental Germanic rules, eg compare "sixteen" and "twenty-one". We mainland Europeans like to mock the English speaking world for their insane unit systems, but at least their numbers make sense.
²) Danish has it worse. They have the same insane number ordering plus insane number names.
3 is "tre", 30 is "tredive". 4 is "fire", 40 is "fyrre". So far so good. Like in many languages, 10x sounds a bit like x.
But 6 is "seks", and 60 is "treds" (!). To make matters worse, 5 is "fem" but 50 is.. "halvtreds" (!!). Similarly 9 is "ni" and 90 is "halvfems". In Danish, for x <= 5 < 10, 10x sounds like ["", "halv"][x mod 2] + ceil(x / 20). I tried mocking the language by saying "fems" instead of "hundrede" but I just got blank stares.
And I'm lucky enough to have grown up on the same insane middle endianness as the Danes. I can't imagine how impossible Danish numbers must be to learn for eg an English speaker. Every time my wife says a number in Danish I spend half a minute doing the math, "she said something with 'tre' in it, so threes, but it ended with an s, so three times twenty, oh but wait there was 'halv' in front of it so subtract 10, ah, fifty". But she didn't say that, she said "to-hundrede-tre-og-halvtreds". By the time I'm done with the math I already forgot the other digits :-)
(And you didn't even mention how "tredive" is pronounced.)
Swedish and Norwegian (and English for that matter) used to count the Germanic way, but swapped to the modern way for 20 onwards at various points.
There's an English nursery rhyme "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" which has the old way as its title. English also used to use the vigesimal system. My great-grandfather was supposedly a bit of a traditionalist even amongst his rural friends, who poked fun at him for saying things like "two score nine? I'm not paying that!".
i think this especially goes for the English system vs metric measurements (though confusingly the English do not use the Imperial system, officially at least) Our brains are much better wired for binary systems like bushels and pecks rather than the French derived decimal system which is only good for studious things (like science) where you have of many orders of magnitude to keep track of regularly. Much easier to communicate/grasp half than 5/10ths.
Similarly the Sexagesimal notation, in common use (clocks etc), points to an generalization that would have been much better than the French system, where we rely on primes for increasing places in the number. Eg 4321(primal) would be 4x5 + 3x3 + 2x2 +1x1 = 34(decimal). Historically we may be stuck with counting on our fingers and toes though, through eternity.
The more "logical" Metric system which is not an extension of the "practical" Imperial system is inevitably bastardized and Creoled in everyday usage. Eg one buys a "Pound Plus" of Chocolate from Trader Joe's (500 grams!). Why is the choice is not one (or fice) Hectogram(s) vs one Kilogram i do not know... except that Hectogram is so obtuse/abstruse i had to google it! Maybe someone in a Metric country can correct me, if they think i am wrong using words like abstruse. One inevitably finds doubling and halving in everyday commerce.
We would do a lot better to extend to tripling, quintupling etc, like the Babylonians did, than directly to the (insane, in my opinion :-) French 10x Metric system.
Not that i am an American chauvinist. Eg i think the American middle endianistic dating system is off the wall weird, and i go out of my way to circumvent it.
Does you native language also have gendered numbers? Is there gender parity with odd numbers male and even numbers female? Or does it enforce the numeric patriarchy by gendering prime numbers male and composite numbers female?
EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.