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125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich
An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference, which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon 'was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.' Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian, was rejected / not voted on, as it was felt to be outside the purview of the conference."
It's called Riyadh Solar Time - look it up. It last one year year before they realised how much of a pain in the arse it was. Also, Japan used to have per-city time zones in five-minute increments, and that was a real pain for doing business, or calculating journey travel/arrival times. Discrete time zones for relatively large areas are just more practical in general.
Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people than "1st of April" for the same reason that saying "blue car" feels more natural than "car of blue". It's because we put adjectives before nouns, while in e.g. French it's the opposite, and explains why they prefer to say "1er Avril".
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun. The reason that non-American English speakers say "1st of April" is because it's the "1st [day] of April". When you put it like that, "April 1st" sounds weird.
It boils down to the fact that what your used to is what sounds natural to you. There are many examples of very odd constructions in English that seem natural only because they are familiar.
This is yet another "it's not what I'm used to hearing, therefore it's wrong/inferior" argument. (Fahrenheit versus Celcius springs to mind)
For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world.
While the AC got modded "Troll", he/she has got a point, expressed in narrow terms, which I'd like to expand at the risk of being Offtopic: Why is it so difficult to standardize things from place to place?
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
- Voltages. Being asthmatic, my wife took her nebulizer on a recent trip to Europe and within ten seconds busted our converter. We busted another one before ordering a special-delivery converter for medium-sized devices, the whole escapade setting us back about 180 CHF.
- Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success).
- Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed.
- DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players.
- Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY???
Best comic strip I've read in the last few months is from Spain, shows some exhausted dude being compared to Sisyphus:
- "Seven years of toil, but I've finally ripped, subtitled and uploaded all the world's DVDs to the Internet, with cover jpgs and all".
Then the guy points a gun to his head as an off-voice says:
- "Now stick them all up your ass, 'cause here comes High Definition, Blu-Ray, HDD and whatever the fuck else".
End of rant.
Back on topic, whoever ruled the Seven Seas first, got to do the homework and implement a practical system of navigation, and at the time it was the British, so I have to tip my hat to them, they did a bloody good job at it, as it still stands to the day and really needs no revision. Leave it at Greenwich, or as it's known in time circles, Coordinated Universal Time.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web:
- The Greeks named the constellations (while inventing the concept), so we still use the Greek names for them.
- The great Islamic culture of a thousand years ago named the visible stars, so we still use the Arab names (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Rigel and Betelgeuse, to name a few just from Orion). FWIW, my favorite star name is the tip of the Big Dipper's handle - Al Kaid, which means "leader of the mourning maidens".
- The Brits invented the modern system of correspondence and postage, so their stamp is the only one that does not specify the country of origin, to this day.
- The North Americans invented the Internet, so USA websites are dot-com, while the rest of the world uses dot-com-dot-suffix.
All I'm saying is, in a modern world with thousands of pockets of eccentric engineers, it's comforting to find examples of global standardization, and the time zones is one of them.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Honestly, I get it from being a former military linguist and studying various languages. The US military/State department testing for languages puts English as a category 5, most of the romance and Slavic languages (a couple exceptions) as category 2 or 3 and many of the Asian languages (that use different alphabets) and middle eastern (Arabic, Hebrew, a couple of others) as category 4. I don't remember any category 1 languages.
These categories are based on simplicity and consistency of the rules for grammar, spelling, etc. They also take into account (as I understand it) difficulty of pronunciation. Korean, for example is a category 4 language. It is a phonetic language though, so once you learn the alphabet it's fairly easy to sound out any word. English, on the other hand, has horrible consistency of spelling and phonetics. Two, to, too; hear, heard; tear (cry), tear (rip); etc etc.
I am a native English speaker. I've studied French, German, Korean, Chinese, a little bit of Japanese, a little bit of Spanish and dabbled briefly with Tagalog. For me, the most difficult has been Chinese, with French, Spanish, and Tagalog being the easiest. I can't speak to any difficulty learning English because I was reading novels at age 4 and don't remember any issues with the language. My "English is considered difficult" is based entirely on my study of other languages, the test mentioned above, and my experiences living with and dealing with other languages and their native speakers.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."