Dot or Comma, Hyphen or Slash
Decimal notation. You never notice something like that until it changes on you.
Today I was putting together some PowerPoint slides for our company president who is from the UK when I noticed that on some slides I had used a dot for a decimal point (as in 2.5) and in other slides I had used a comma (as in 2,5). Yes, living and working in two cultures and two languages does have its small disadvantages - I am perpetually confused on things like decimal and date notation.
In most cases it’s clear. At work, I have a German version of Excel which uses the comma for the decimal separator. But we also use a financial software package from the US which has not been localized for Europe. That’s when you have to remember to use the dot for a decimal point. At home, I have a US Mac with US MS Office, which is clearly in the decimal point mode.
But get me started writing a memo in Word or slides in PowerPoint and the confusion sets in. Who is my main audience? What is their preferred decimal notation?
Today I chose to go with the decimal point (as in 2.5), as this is the standard notation for the UK (as it is for the US, Australia and New Zealand; according to Wiki “all English-speaking countries”). The rest of the world uses the comma.
(Just for completeness sake here… English-speaking countries use the comma to separate the thousands, as in 10,000. The rest of the world denotes thousands with dots, as in 10.000.)
Date notation is worse for me. Month-day-year is typically American. Day-month-year is typically European and even the Brits seem to have joined the Europeans, at least on this issue. But then you have the punctuation which goes along with it - should one choose dot, hyphen or slash? Thank goodness there is no date notation police out there, because I would clearly be guilty of using different notations on one day, potentially on one document.
When I store files on my laptop, I often add the date into the file name. Years ago I received a tip from Sweden and started using yearmonthday for file names, as in 20080124_customermemo.doc. This is the only date notation which, when multiple files are listed alpha-numerically in a directory, will show up in the correct date order. This method of notation is referred to as “bigendian” and is the official International Standard ISO 8601. A number of countries have officially adopted this standard but only a few (China, India, Hungary, Sweden) really use it.
But I am just scratching the surface here on date notation. The complexities which arise by combining the order of day, month, year with the punctuation choices (dot, comma, hyphen, slash) result in different styles and habits practically in every country. If you do business regularly with a certain country, I recommend reading the Wiki entry under “Date and Time Notation By Country”. In general, it’s sufficient to know that only the US uses month-day-year, that most countries in the world use day-month-year and that the international ISO standard (really good for computers) is year-month-day.
Anybody else a fan of year-month-day?
Then there is the issue of time notation and how to read the clock…
Let’s save that for another day.
Image from www.mathsisfun.com
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POSTED IN: Customs and Culture
4 opinions for Dot or Comma, Hyphen or Slash
Jerry806
Jan 25, 2008 at 11:08 am
“Bigendian” is a good suggestion that I will now start using. Thanx for the good daily postings.
Susan Gunelius
Jan 25, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Jean, I can completely relate to what you’re saying. I submitted a final manuscript to my publisher in the UK, Palgrave Macmillan, in November and before I submitted, I had to go back through the entire thing to change dates and more to fit with their requirements.
Oddly enough, now in the editing stage, the editor is changing it all back to the American format.
The grammatical struggle continues. At least my book doesn’t include measurements. Converting back and forth between inches and feet to centimeters and meters would have been painful.
Chris
Jan 27, 2008 at 9:03 am
I’ve been using the year-month-day notation for years, probably because computer didn’t always track time parameters as well as they do now. My problem comes when Germans, wanting to conform to US norms, simply use slashes instead of dots, leaving me to figure out whether 01/02/07 is Jan 2 or Feb 1, 2007.
A.T.
Jan 27, 2008 at 5:32 pm
well, when you talk about rest-of-world - be VERY careful: at least post-USSR countries and some EU countries do NOT have’em at all (or use spaces - when local currency is devalvated)
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