----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, 2003-09-04 8:22
Subject: Re: [ISO8601] Re: Pure ISO 8601 or varied for popular
formats
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 2003 09 03 Wednesday
02:17
Subject: Re: [ISO8601] Re: Pure ISO 8601
or varied for popular formats
I
was referring to just the date format, not the actual calendar in use. The
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have been using the year-month-day date order
for a VERY LONG time. Just ask Justin JIH ( his site is at http://www.geocities.com/jusjih ). He'll tell you the
same thing.
What I
really wonder is how did the US all of a sudden just start using
month-day-year order in their dates ("Sunday, January 9, 2000" &
"01/09/2000" are examples of written dates. "Sunday, January the ninth, two
thousand" & "Sunday, January ninth, two thousand" are examples of the
speech used in the US). The US' official language is English, which has always
used day-month-year in a written date order in English-speaking countries
before the US somehow, "came up with", the month-day-year order. Where did
they get this idea from? Maybe they always have written their dates in
month-day order and when they needed to put the year in, they just slapped it
on as something
extra?
What's
accepted in HK? A year-month-day longhand date in English like "2000 January 1
(Saturday)"?
==========================================================
I have an educated guess as to
why we Americans got stuck with such an ass backward
system. The first clue is the English language, which used to express
dates based on Christian religious traditions of yore, and - by the
nature of western European languages - using possessive mode. First
of April, in the Year of the Lord Seventeen Hundred and
Sixty-nine.
In numbers, 1st of April,
1769 AD. The revolutionary American governments wanted to break away
from anything that was British, and switched the order around*. July fourth, 1955. The growing economic prowess
and world leader ambitions would not allow the United States to give up its
traditions, even when it meant falling behind Canada, Mexico and the rest of
the world. Hence the US is the only major industrialized nation that has
made no effort to subscribe to the SI (Systeme Internationale), the
modernized metric system, although it has been a legal measurement system
there for over a century. The US also starts the week with the weekend,
and the first hour of the day is 12, after midnight, instead of zero
hour. You go figure!
Hong Kong is still plugging the
British system, but slowly the ISO 8601 system and SI are seeping
in. The cars are still driven on the left side of the highways, the
flats are still sold by area of square feet. Hong Kong has about 45
years to join the standards set by the Mainland Chinese. However,
economic considerations will force Hong Kong and Macao to modernize much
sooner than that.
*A similar madness
is what the Taiwan government is cooking up by developing a system for
Romanization of Chinese characters, one that is different from the
decades-old Pin-yin Chinese system. Their reason for being
different: to spite Beijing. It is a blatant politicizing of a
scientific issue. Never mind the difficulties of those who are trying to
tackle the Mandarin language and now have to learn two different methods
of reading Chinese characters printed in western letters.
