Alternate spelling and date formats

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robbage
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Alternate spelling and date formats

Post by robbage »

(From another topic)
AO11912 wrote:Because in the USA they used to use the 'Normal' DD/MM/YYYY up the late 90's early 20's (reference needed, cant find it on wiki, but im sure i have read it)

4th of July was when they used the old style, September 11 is when they used the odd style.
Wikipedia wrote: Little endian forms, starting with the day

This sequence is common to the vast majority of the world's countries. This date format originates from the custom of writing the date as 'the 9th day of November in the year of our Lord 2003' in western religious and legal documents, which at one time were the majority of documents created. The format has shortened over time but the order of the elements has remained constant.

Big endian forms, starting with the year

In this format the most significant data item is written before lesser data items i.e. year before month before day. It is consistent with the big endianness of the Indian decimal numbering system, which progresses from the highest to the lowest order magnitude. That is, using this format textual orderings and chronological orderings are identical. This form is standard in Asian countries, Hungary, Sweden and the US armed forces.

Examples for the 9th of November 2003:
2003-11-09: the ISO 8601 international standard orders the components of a date like this, and additionally uses leading zeros, for example, 0813-03-01, to be easily read and sorted by computers. It is used with UTC in the Internet date/time format (see the external link below). This format is also favoured in certain Asian countries, mainly East Asian countries, as well as in some European countries. The big endian convention is also frequently used in Canada, but all three conventions are used there.
2003. november 9. – The official format in Hungary, point after year and day, month name with small initial. Following shorter formats also can be used: 2003. nov. 9., 2003. 11. 9., 2003. XI. 9.
2003.11.9 using dots and no leading zeros, common in China

Middle endian forms, starting with the month

This sequence is used primarily in the United States, partially in Canada, and a few other countries. This date format was commonly used alongside the small endian form in the United Kingdom until the early 20th Century, and can be found in both defunct and modern print media such as the London Gazette and The Times, respectively. In the UK, it would be verbally expressed as Sunday, November the 9th, whereas in the United States, it is usually Sunday, November 9th, although usage of "the" isn't uncommon.


Wikipedia wrote:
(In the USA...) The day-month-order has increased in usage notably since the early 1980s. The month is usually written as a name, as in "12-Dec-1999". Many genealogical databases and the MLA citation style use this format[citation needed]. The I-94 cards and new customs declaration cards used for people entering the United States where passengers are requested to write pertinent dates in the numeric 'dd mm yy' format. Visas and passports issued by the State Department also use this format.


From what I can extract from wikipedia and a few other pages, both forms were used in the UK where the month was written as a word. This was inherited by the US but evolved more towards the backward form. It wasn't until the month was written as a number that problems occured. Now ISO requires year-month-day which is a Good Thing™
Then there's the Repulic Of China who use a three digit year, month then day where the year is actually the number of years since 1911 :shock:

The history of why words like colour, centre and randomise where changed to color, centre and randomize is a whole other story. Seems it can mostly be blamed on Webster and his dictionary.
Rob
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