Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2025 September 10

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September 10

Questions

1. In English, are initialisms ever spoken as words? For example, is "LED" in all caps ever pronounced as [lɛd]? In Finnish the same acronym is pronounced more commonly as a word than as "äl-ee-dee".
2. Do people in the US say "10th day of September" or "10th of September"?
3. Do any English speakers, even those who mostly use 24-hour clock, consider it significant when time changes from 19:59 to 20:00, as it has a "rollover" in its numbers like from year 1999 to year 2000? Or do any non-English speakers consider it significant?
4. In English, are all-numeric dates like 10/9/2025 ever used in running prose? It is common to write like this: "The event runs from 8/9/2025 to 14/9/2025."
5. Does English ever say: The shop closes at 18 today"? They can say "The shop closes at 18:00 today", but what about dropping the ":00" part?
6. Why do English- and French-speaking countries put house number before street name and placename before postcode, if most other countries do the opposite?

--40bus (talk) 16:50, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

(British English):

1. Always the acronym "LED" (el-ee-dee)

4. Not in prose. It's more likely to be "The event runs from 8th to 14th September 2025.", with the definite article "the" implied before each day number.

5. No.

6. Because that's what the postal service requires: see Address format by country and area. The question could be inverted to ask about, say, Finnish. Bazza 7 (talk) 17:20, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Replying from a British English point of view.

1. Not infrequently in my experience, if they are pronounceable and if they would not potentially be confused with a same-sounding word. For LED, "ell-ee-dee" is however more common because of the existing words lead (the metal) and led (past participle of lead the verb). In general there is no overarching preference in casual speech for either convention, and both are used.

2. This Brit would expect the Americanism ""10th September" and find "10th day of September" to be an archaism, but Americans may very well correct me.

3. Not that I have ever heard of, in the UK or any other Anglophone country.

4. Yes, that would be quite usual in such an instructional circumstance, though not in literary prose.

5. That would never be said in BrE, though it might appear written, particularly on the sort of printed shop door sign that has adjustable numbers.

6. As far as I know, it has always been done in both countries, and from my brief residence in (West) Germany, is done there also. I imagine when the idea of individual house numbers was adopted at various times in various countries, each made the decision based on circumstances peculiar to them.

{The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.98.196 (talk) 17:26, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Re #2: In the U.S., both "September 10th" and "10th of September" (depending on context) are said frequently; "10th September" not so much. "10th day of September" would be almost completely restricted to written texts such as formal documents. Deor (talk) 17:50, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

1. Some people would say that initialisms are by definition never pronounced as a single word. According to this nomenclature, a sequence of letters pronounced as a single word is called an acronym, and a sequence of letters pronounced letter-by-letter is called an initialism. However, not everyone uses this nomenclature; some people call both types acronyms. So I'm not clear on exactly what you're asking. If you want to know whether a sequence of initial letters is ever pronounced as a word, yes, there are many examples of such acronyms, such as "NASA", "radar", "scuba", "OPEC", "AIDS", "modem", "laser", "MIDI", "MILF", etc.

2. People in the US would rarely say either "10th day of September" or "10th of September" in casual conversation. The latter is slightly more common if prefixed with "the", but more common would be "September 10th" or "September the 10th".

4. Yes, all numeric dates are common in written prose. Unfortunately, the order differs between countries: in the US, MDY is most common while in England and many other countries, DMY is most common.

5. Yes, it would be common to say "the shop opens at 8" to mean 8:00am, or "the shop closes at 5" to mean 5:00pm. In the US, 24-hour time is rarely used, so "the shop closes at 18" would not be heard or understood. CodeTalker (talk) 18:30, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

3. Do any English speakers consider it significant when the clock shows the current year (20:25)? --40bus (talk) 19:23, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Aside from the military, such a thing has never and can never happen for Americans as we do not use the 24 hour clock. The last such occurrence would thus have been more than 700 years ago.-- User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:21, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Are there any English-speaking countries where 24-hour clock is common? --40bus (talk) 21:27, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

I am sure that most if not all of them other than in North America have 24-hour clocks (and other time displays) as well as 12-hour analog clocks (i.e. circular, with hands).

I (in the UK) am looking at the 24-hour time in the corner of my computer screen, and it is also displayed on my microwave oven, and optionally on my digital wristwatch (though I have a 'fancier' analog 12-hour watch too), and on my car dashboard, but my father's previous car had a 12-hour analog clock. Bedside clock-radios often have (or had) 24-hour displays. Railway and bus station train-arrival/departure displays always use 24-hour times, including the current time, and some stations had mechanical 24-hour clocks even before the advent of bulb, LED and other such electrical displays (although they also usually had, and have, 12-hour clocks as well). In short, in the UK both are widely used by everybody, depending on the particular circumstances, and many electronic devices can be configured to display either as preferred. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.98.196 (talk) 21:53, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

6. I worked as a taxi driver for a time (before the GPS era), and most people would tell me where they wanted to go using the standard order: house number, street name, suburb. Nothing exceptional about that; except, the first thing I needed to know was the suburb, then the street name, and finally the house number (which I usually didn't even need to know until I pulled into the street). Exactly the reverse of the usual order. (The cultural dominance of the postal service to the detriment of humble transport workers is something that should be studied at the highest level.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:12, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

6. In olden times in America, mail sent to someone in a small town would often be addressed as simply "so-and-so, small-town-name, state name" or whatever. In fact, if the mail originated in that town also, it might be simply addressed to "so-and-so, city" and nothing else. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:50, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

According to legend, in the late 1700s Erasmus Darwin (Charles' granddad), from England, sent a letter to Benjamin Franklin and addressed it:

Benjamin Franklin

The New World

and, it reached its target destination (though surely it would not had the addressee been, say, Jack Fisher, rather than Benjamin Franklin). 76.20.114.184 (talk) 22:52, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

There is also a (presumably apocryphal) story that a letter from China, addressed to "Boerhaave in Europe", reached its destination.  ​‑‑Lambiam 11:52, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

1. again: as a general rule, three-letter abbreviations are pronounced as seperate letters (an exception is "CAT scan"), while longer acronyms are often pronounced as a single word if at all possible, or sometimes a combination of the two. An example of the latter is V/STOL which is pronounced "Vee-stoll". Alansplodge (talk) 14:33, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

regarding all numeric dates in Wikipedia, due to the confusion, the guideline states to always write the month in full. Either DMY or MDY can be used depending on if the article has (strong) ties to the US or not, or depending on what date format the article started with. The YMD format 2025/9/16 is just unnatural and is mostly only used in sorting, as well as in China, Korea, Japan and Hungary. Its common for all numeric dates to be written in prose, provided that the information is within a country.

And with the 12/24 hour clock, the 24-hour clock is almost never said out loud, except in the context of railway timetables. For example, 17:00 would be pronounced 'seventeen hundred' and 17:20 would be 'seventeen twenty'. When the clock is in display, it tends to be 50/50. Its a bit like on weather to use the imperial or metric system since the UK (and Canada) is in a mess. The 24 hour clock has advantages on which you could calculate how long you've been doing something between 10:00 and 16:00 compared with 10am and 4pm.

Also with acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations, an acronym is a shortened form pronounced as a word (NASA) but in practice, the three terms are often used interchangeably. JuniperChill (talk) 16:01, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

Languages of countries

Why English has not become majority native language in former British colonies of Africa and Oceania like Spanish has become the majority language in former Spanish colonies in Latin America? --40bus (talk) 21:29, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Oceania? You mean, like Australia and New Zealand? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.98.196 (talk) 22:00, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Possibly due to the European colonization of Africa having lasted shorter, and having been marred by significant in-fighting, but English is still a very important language on large parts of the continent. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:15, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

In former French and Belgian colonies in Africa, French hasn't become the majority native language, although it has become the lingua franca. Maybe you should look at the ratio of natives versus descendants of colonists. Which in turn comes down to: in the Americas, the natives were almost wiped out by European diseases. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:35, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

This is true in, particularly, northern America (US & Canada), but he was specifically comparing to Latin America, where the demographic situation is markedly different: in many (most?) Latin American countries the majority of the populations are a European/Amerindian mix. In the Spanish colonies the practice of integration/assimilation with the native peoples was largely the norm, while in the English colonies it was mostly nonexistent. Of course the "Spanish model" was also problematic in other ways, i.e., the indigenous cultural loss in various countries was often greater. 76.20.114.184 (talk) 00:56, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Paraguayan Guarani is the most common mother tongue of the Paraguayans; see Languages of Paraguay. And Spanish is also not the majority native language in Bolivia, although it is the most common native language; see Languages of Bolivia.  ​‑‑Lambiam 11:41, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

With the Philippines, the original second official language was Spanish, but since the Americans took over, English replaced it. Nether Spanish nor English is a common native language, with the various languages of the Philippines being spoken natively. There does exist a Spanish creole language called Chavacano. JuniperChill (talk) 16:55, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

A few questions that came to mind.

1. Why are German and Italian not as widespread as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch? And why didn't Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia colonize like Western European countries did?
2. Why so few people in English-majority countries can speak more than one language?
3. Why none of language maps show entire countries speaking only their colony's language in former colonies' case? I used to find it odd that e.g. India is not shown as speaking English entirely, or French and British colonies in Africa speaking French and English entirely, respectively. Despite that I associated India with English language, and African countries to their colonial languages. Even for South Africa, it was strange to find English being spoken only around Johannesburg and Cape Town, despite it feels like a country culturally similar to USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I classify it as the seventh member of the group of these countries.

--40bus (talk) 18:41, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

To answer 1, Germany and Italy had colonial empires for much shorter periods than other European powers. But many people emigrated from Germany into (former) colonies of other European powers, so German was widely spoken by communities in places like Canada and the US (and Brazil and various other countries), but after WW1 many of these communities integrated more with the rest of society and ceased speaking German. Russia did colonise, just slightly different from others: they colonised the almost contiguous Russian Empire, famously including Alaska. But the Russian Empire was vast and underpopulated, so they actually invited other people in as colonists (as subjects of Russia), for example the Volga Germans. —Kusma (talk) 18:57, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Italy's access to the ocean would be very easy to cut off. Even the German access to the ocean has obvious "pinch points". Eastern Europe shares this problem and has fewer all-year ports.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:13, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Why are German and Italian not as widespread as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch? Germany was united in 1871, cf. Franco-Prussian War, Italy in 1870, cf. Unification of Italy. So they simply had less time to build up a fleet and conquer colonies. Moreover the German chancellor Bismarck (1871-1890) did not show much interest in colonies: "[...] meine Karte von Afrika liegt in Europa." 'my map of Africa is located in Europe.' It was Wilhelm II (1888-1918) who wanted Germany to be a global power so he his politics focused more on colonies. So Germany entered the race for colonies when there was little to gain because Africa, the last big chunk of "undiscovered" land, had already been occupied, by this time, cf. Berlin Conference. Ironically most of German colonial territories were occupied when Bismarck was chancellor. Wilhelm's aggressive imperialistic policies just caused more tensions between the European powers.--92.210.41.137 (talk) 15:49, 24 September 2025 (UTC)