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How I wish for the day English decides to upend everything and go phonetic with a truncated alphabet and word modernization.
We'd then go to World Standard Time. It's 13:00 everywhere, not just in specific time zones. We then go to a Year 12023 Human Era International Fixed calendar.
I'm with you for the alphabet and human era, but what's the thing about timezones? We'd still have to keep track of each area's normal waking/business hours, but it'd be less standardized and harder to remember unless there's something I'm missing.
The time zone thing means if the time on your clock reads 00:00 hours, it's 00:00 hours everywhere.
That means if I say I have a meeting at 14:00 with someone in China while I live in the USA, there's no conversion. It's 14:00 everywhere. Every clock reads the same. I know when to be on the call.
All it does is change what time people arbitrarily 'Get up', 'Fall asleep', 'start school' etc.
Say we arbitrarily say 00:00 is what 'midnight' would be in Britain at the Prime Meridian.
That means nothing really changes for Britain. But in Central Time USA, 00:00 means it's when we're just starting dinner.
No daylight savings times anywhere. Work places can set their own work times however they want. Nobody gets confused about having to convert time to different time zones for logistics which is the biggest benefit. If the ISS says it'll be over New York City at 13:37, I'll know exactly when to turn on my HAM radio.
I'd wake up at 13:00, get breakfast, be into work at 14:00. Get home at 22:00, etc.
You've literally just shifted the problem, those two businessmen now have to both figure out what hour their daily cycle starts on, to assess if they will be free or not during the time. The idea of "business hours" would just be "so what hours on the 24h clock are you 'at work' at?'"
Same problem, different calculation.
Except when you lived in that zone you'd instinctively know the local hours within a week of the change. So you just need to tell the other guy "I'm working from 0300 to 1100 tomorrow, when are you free?" Without worrying which time zone to reference.
It also would give a path to abolishing DST, since the main reason it still exists is "because other places so it". Using a global time would allow local areas to implement DST or not based on their own preference, without affecting anyone else. I believe this would quickly lead to most places abolishing it.
Note that I live in Saskatchewan, one of the few DST-free zones in the world (well actually permanent DST, as we joined the time zone to our west) and it's annoying that the rest of the world is always goofing around with their clocks. It's one of those literally pointless traditions from the days of gas lamps.
That is about as simplistic as a model as I can possibly give... now imagine the logistics of that bullshit when dealing with multiple time zones and actual transit times lol.
You can lament the fact that you're trying to be kind and figure out a good time for a call in such a situation when there's NEVER going to be a good one anyway.
With this, it takes out EVERY extra timezone calculation for shipping, receiving, internet clocks, code regarding time difference variables. SO MUCH.
code regarding time difference variables
Ugh, I HATE the pointless code required by the stupid time locales, DST, and how many languages force you to play along with it all when all you really wanted was an emulated hardware RTC so you could schedule a task to run 10 minutes from now.
There'd still be "timezones" where the divisions on what times everyone lives by are drawn, right? Like, in this state business hours are 14:00 to 22:00, and over at this other place it's 00:00 to 08:00. For simplicity and commerce those boundaries would likely look very much like timezones...
You'll still need to convert to the local time like we do now in order to know what part of the day that time is, but instead of doing that conversion once, you'll then you do it for all sorts of things and keep track of all the different times everything is in that other place too. Currently, you can look up the time it is somewhere (or add/subtract a number of hours if you're old-school) and when you see it's 8am, you know it's morning there. If there are no timezones, knowing it's 8am doesn't actually tell you anything anymore.
The point is that if I say 6 p.m., you don't know what that means for Mexico, and South Africa, and Malaysia anyway. Not only that, but the vast majority of the world that depends on those times don't care if it's 1st shift's lunchtime. The world runs 24/7. It doesn't just run from dawn til dusk.
Any of this 'extra step' calculation you're imagining is something people already do needlessly. This way those 'time zones' don't matter.
Train ships from NewYork at 1:00 a.m. and arrives at destination at 7:00 a.m., it then gets offloaded and trucked to Walmart at 11:00 a.m.
Congrats, no having to compensate for time zone differences. A=B=C
Not A=B-1 back to B+1 because you happen to ship over an arbitrary time zone line.
And also, not everyone even has the same schedules. USA has common "9-5" office jobs, in germany people more commonly start at 8. So even with timezones you still need the schedule adjustment to a degree.
I play online video game tournaments with players globally, one person will complain about having to play at 11 because it's so early and would rather play at 0, someone else complains that 16 is too late and would rather play at 7. And even with many people in that community being very experienced with timezone conversion, they still occasionally mix something up.
One single global time would just be better. But I also brought it up once on reddit and got pretty much the same reactions.
Plus a bunch of people would have the day turn over into the next day in the middle of the work day, which would be pretty inconvenient.
How so? Becky, I need you on that zoom call on Wednesday, 00:30 with our distributor Carlos in Mexico, the tax agent Amahle in South Africa, and our ship Captain who's currently in Malaysia.
No confusion. Everyone knows what time they need to turn on the PC.
No conversions for PC times, no shipping time charts, none of it.
You don’t see an inconvenience living in a place where a restaurant’s hours are
Wed 9pm - Thu 7am
Thu 9pm - Fri 6am
Fri 9pm - Sat 9am
And it seems perfectly fine to have it be ambiguous when you say something is tomorrow if you mean after lunch or after you sleep?
You can’t think of any clerical, banking, or technical inconveniences with having things carry over into the next day in the middle of the day?
No that makes very easy sense to me lmfao. Maybe you're just overthinking it?
First off quit using pm and am. It's a 24:00 hour system. Why are you denoting different days when it starts in one day?
Bank Hours:
Wednesday 2200-0700
Thursday 2200-0700
Friday 2200-0500
Sat sun Closed
Bam, now everyone in the world knows when they're open. Now I know if I'm road tripping I can stop at the bank without having to think about whether I crossed a time zone.
You are definitely underthinking it.
Imagine in another locale store hours:
Mon 23:00 - 10:00 (Tue)
Wed 0:00 - 10:00 (this is the very next day in real time, but since it opens one hour later it’s now entirely in the next day)
Doesn't seem like it judging by the non-reactionary responses lol.
Hell, we're going to actually need this system of time once we start spacefaring so we have a solar standard.
Seems like you’re just hand-waving the arguments against it, instead of considering what life would be like. There would be virtually no benefit but definite annoyances.
Seems like you’re just hand-waving the arguments against it, instead of considering what life would be like. There would be virtually no benefit but definite annoyances.
Ok now I know you're just fucking with me lmfao.
Ok but that could be the ass crack of dawn or the middle of the night for some of those people and you have no way of knowing that from your end.
Yes... just like it is now lol. You're telling me you can instantly convert what time 6 p.m. is for Mexico, South Africa, And Malaysia is?
Can you? Congrats, you've already done your 'extra step' calculation anyway lol.
With time zones, if it’s 10am where you are and you need to talk to someone somewhere else in the world, you look up their time zone and see what time it is there, and you know if it’s 3pm that they are probably still at work, and if it’s 1am there then they are sleeping, and so on.
If you don’t have time zones and you just know it’s also 10am there, what do you look up to quickly know whether they are likely working, eating, sleeping in that location? Do you look up when sunset is in that city and then check its latitude and the time of year so you can estimate where they probably are in their day?
I never said I had all the time zones memorized.
But in order to see if 1600 universal time is a good time for everyone involved you'd need a system of charts telling everyone what time of day each time represents at different points across the world, and just like that you've reinvented time zones.
You really don't lol. Again, you're overthinking it. Everyone has to do that already. I say can we meet at 18:00? No, how about 19:00? Yeah that's late for me but sure we can make it work.
That's it. That's already how it goes lol.
The change isn't really meant for those parts anyway. It's for the people who actually keep the world running logistically lol. That's just the easiest to imagine for most.
I feel like if wednesday at 3pm is the same worldwide, Thursday never comes.
ˈwʊdnt ɪt biː ˈbɛtə ʤʌst tuː juːz aɪ-piː-eɪ fɔːr ɔːl ˈlæŋɡwɪʤɪz ðɛn?
aɪ noː jɚ ˈbiːɪŋ fəˈsiːʃəs, bʌt ˈɪŋglɪʃ ˈvɑʊəlz ɛsˈpɛʃəli kən biː ə ˈɹiːəl ˈklʌstɚfʌk. ɪf ə wɚd ɪz tə biː ˌjunɪˈvɚsəli ˈɹɛkəgnaɪzd baɪ ɪts ˈspɛlɪŋ, ðɛn ðə ˈspɛlɪŋ wɪl nɑt ˈfeɪθfəli ˌɹɛpɹɪˈzɛnt mɛni ˈpiplz pɹəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃənz... so nɑʊ ju hæv ðə seɪm ˈpɹɑbləm æz bəˈfoɹ ɛkˈsɛpt wɪθ ˈhɑrdɚ-tə-taɪp ˈlɛtɚz.
ʃwɑ ɪn pɑɹˈtɪkulɚ ɪz ə hoːl ˈʃɪtʃoː ɑn ɪts oːn
ɑn ðæt noːt, gɛs weɹ aɪ gɹuː ʌp :)
Is thi# arameic?
IPA. it's English but with the phonetic symbols for each sound (instead of letters, so "ng" is actually one symbol: ŋ, and soft "th" is ð)
I'm shite at reading accents from IPA but I'm gonna guess northern England. Or California. Dynamic extremes! Which is right?
Not really. There's accents and things that mess that up.
Not really, because of accent differences. The best you could do is account for all phonemes distinguished across standardized varieties, regardless of their phonetic realization. Of course, you couldn't possibly account for all of them (e.g. distinguishing the Australian /æ/ vs /æː/ would be troublesome for British and American speakers).
Hīr'z æn icsperimentăl sistăm ðæt s̄ūd würc ăcros SSBI (SSBE) ænd DĂ (GAmerican). Æz jū cæn sī, homăfounz ār spelt aidenticăly, wīc fōrmz ārn't rităn æt ōl, ænd plein vauălz ār dz̄enărăly jūz'd wið ðēr Roumæns saundz.
Strüt-Fut-Gūs-Cjur-Für Cit-Flīs-Nīr-Fir-Hæpy Dres-Feis-Scwēr-Fern Træp-Mauþ-Prais-Baþ-Pām-Stārt Cloþ-Ts̄ois-Löt-Þōt-Nōrþ Cömă-Letăr (tuc ðæt wün from Roumeiniăn)
How I wish for the day English decides to upend everything and go phonetic with a truncated alphabet and word modernization.
Also, drop the whole uppercase and lowercase nonsense. Just pick one!
UPPERCASE IT IS, WE LOUD NOW
THE QUIET UPSETS SLANESH
Not gonna lie, I like the cases if only to make scanning for proper nouns easier. The capital letters stick out. Maybe keep caps only for proper nouns.
I was having this debate a week ago when dealing with those strange proper noun cases like departments in an organization. They're sorta proper nouns, but then when generalized it goes back lowercase. Security Department vs security escorted them out of the building.
Having cursive, lower, and upper cases is really dumb though.
We could just add a new letter to denote a proper noun? Kick it up to modern relevancy with the @ or #? Lol.
MAYBE DO IT SPANISH STYLE AND SURROUND IT? @JOHN SMITH #JOHN SMITH#
No more having to use shift regularly.
There's definitely some weirdness in that. I feel like it's an edge case, though, and could just say to either refer to them as the full Security Department, or capitalize Security as well. Or go the German route and just capitalize all nouns, they're usually the most important part of a written sentence anyway.
Thinking about it further, there are a few use cases for caps in readability. Abbreviated, for example, so they're not interpreted as a word. I think the only one I really struggle with WRT capitalization is the arbitrary capitalization of beginning words.
man like a billion people over 6 continents speak English. HTF is that gonna happen? Whole thing is crowd sourced as fuck.
That's a neat way to travel into the future 👍.
English could never go phonetic because of regional differences
Why would that change anything? Standard English is already the bar which it's based on. Do you think other phonetic languages like Korean don't have dialects?
Just because the UK's ability to speak English is fucked doesn't mean the written language doesn't have to be lol.
well Korean does have that issue in some cases, such as 잎 being pronounced 닢. and it is standardized based on Seoul hemegony, while southern dialects speak differently from how it's written. and then you have jeju dialect (jeju language) which is a whole other beast
13 month calendar pleeeease. Every holiday can be on Friday or Monday.