RE: [libreoffice-users] French/English date

Hi :)
Tuesday 29 November 2011 feels very wrong to me.  There needs to be a th in super-script just after 
the 29.  I agree about removing superfluous punctuation though.  
Regards from
Tom :)

--- On Wed, 30/11/11, Brian Barker <b.m.barker@btinternet.com> wrote:

From: Brian Barker <b.m.barker@btinternet.com>
Subject: RE: [libreoffice-users] French/English date
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Date: Wednesday, 30 November, 2011, 7:51

At 23:38 29/11/2011 +1100, Bruce Carlson wrote:
> It has bothered me for years but the correct long date format in English or at least English 
> English is :- eg: Tuesday the 29th. of November, 2011. Note the correct use of articles, 
> ordinals, commas and full stops... (the things Americans call periods.) No word processor or 
> database application I have ever seen can format long dates correctly in English or any other 
> language that I'm aware of and that is why I've written my own code and macros to format dates 
> the way I was taught at school and while that was many many many years ago evolution is no excuse 
> for inaccuracy. To format dates incorrectly seems to me to be an expedience, not an attempt at 
> accuracy. Whilst we have for many years had to endure commercial applications written in one 
> particular cultural style or another I believe open source is a very good opportunity to get 
> localisations (notice the use of "s" and not zed) correct and if people from various cultures can 
> contribute to this we
 will all be winners.

Sorry, but you were mis-taught at school.  What you write and what you see in written language does 
not always correspond exactly to what you say.  Yes: the way you say that date in British English 
may well be "tuesday the twenty-ninth of november twenty eleven", but that doesn't mean that you 
have to express all of those sounds in writing.  Take, for example, your "2011".  If that were an 
account number, you would probably read and speak it as "two oh one one" (or possibly "two zero one 
one") or "two oh double one"; if it were a plain number, you would say "two thousand and eleven" 
(USians would say "two thousand eleven"); as it is a date, you say "twenty eleven".  (Well, I hope 
you do.)  You don't read "29th" as "two nine tee aitch" or even as "twenty-nine tee aitch", but as 
"twenty-ninth".  Your telephone number may end "one oh double six", but the battle of Hastings was 
in "ten sixty-six": they are spoken differently but written the same. 
 James Bond wouldn't recognise "zero zero seven".

The normal way of writing your date in British English is "Tuesday 29 November 2011", and you read 
this as "tuesday the twenty-ninth of november twenty eleven".  But you are very welcome to format 
your dates exactly as you wish, of course - until you get a job where you are required to follow 
the accepted system.

Oh, and you don't put a full stop after "29th" in any case: in British English usage there is no 
full stop if the end of the original is included in the abbreviation.  "Prof." has a full stop, but 
"Mr" and "Dr" do not; "Rev." has one but "Revd" does not.  Your primary school may well have got 
that wrong too.

There are plenty of authorities for all this, but you need to trust proper style guides, not 
primary school textbooks.  And there's a reason why you cannot find any product which follows your 
teachers' advice!

Brian Barker


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