Countries of the world, categorized by the date format they use. You may be wondering what the hell this has to do with Pi Day - read on to find out. Image: Wikipedia It's time to get excited, because today is a holiday you didn't know you needed: Pi Day! Also known as π day, or #PiDay, as this relatively obscure holiday has suddenly become a massive trending topic on Twitter and other social media. What is Pi Day? As a glowing article at Time Magazine explains: March 14 (3/14) is celebrated annually as Pi Day because the date resembles the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — 3.14159265359 or 3.14 for short. ' If that explanation sounds horrendously nerdy, that's because it is. While Pi Day may be a day for the pocket protector prone among us to rejoice, others of us made sure to erase terms like "circumference" and "diameter" from our memory the minute we got out of geometry class back in 9th grade. For the less nerdy among us looking to make sense of the definition of Pi, think of it this way. Imagine you just ordered a 12 inch (one foot) pizza. Why is it called a 12 inch pizza? Because that's the distance of a straight line from one side of the pizza to the other - the length of the cut you'd have to make to cut the pizza in half. But the distance around that pizza is longer than one foot. For that same foot-wide pizza, the distance around the entire crust would be somewhere around 3.14 feet, or if the pizza chef has measured it really precisely, 3.14159265359 feet: Pi! For people like us, nerds of a more linguistic rather than mathematical variety, the fact that the English word "pie" (round baked goods that come in handy for explaining abstract mathematical concepts) is so similar to "pi" (originally a letter of the greek alphabet chosen arbitrarily to represent a precise geometric value) is just a happy coincidence. The origins of the word "pie" have nothing to do with the letter/word "pi", though the similarity offers plenty of opportunities for cheesy pie-based explanations of pi, as well as an opportunity for English speaking pie purveyors to cash in on Pi Day. But there's another curious and equally nerdy factoid about Pi Day that few people appear to be talking about: it only really makes sense in the date system used in the United States. Think about it. If you're from the States, referring to March 14th as 3/14 seems like the most natural thing in the world. But in many other country in the world, March 14th would never be called 3/14. Instead, it would be called 14/3.
The map at the top of this piece shows the countries of the world arranged according to the date format they use. The massive sea of light blue indicates countries that primarily use the "day-month-year" format, i.e. "March 14, 2016" becomes 14/03/2016. The countries shown in yellow use "year-month-day" format: March 14, 2016 becomes 2016/03/14. The smattering of green, red, and gray shows countries that use some combination of these or other formats. And that lone blob of magenta in the top left of the map, the US, represents one of only three countries in the world to use a very special format: "month-day-year", the only format in which March 14, 2016 becomes 3/14/2016 and bears any meaningful resemblance to Pi. (The other two countries to use this format are Belieze and the Federated States of Micronesia; for a full explanation of the map, see this Wikipedia page.) Why is the US the only major country to use this format? Perhaps the most credible answer is that this format originated in Britain, and was later changed in Britian and other British colonies. But since the change happened after America broke away from the rule of Her Majesty, it never made it to America's shores. Actually, the "month-day-year" format may make sense linguistically, at least for languages (like English) that tend to speak dates in those terms. In other words, there's no reason that a language couldn't evolve so that saying "March 14th, 2016" didn't sound natural. It would then make sense to use "month-day-year" when writing dates numerically, following the accepted spoken format. But from a purely data-based point of view, this makes much less sense. Why should the month, the calendar value ranking higher than the day but lower than the year, be put first? It would be like referring to yourself with your middle name first. Logically speaking, the only formats that really make sense are either "day-month-year" or "year-month-day". Presumably, the industrial revolution and its proximity to the very heavily day-month-yearified continental Europe put pressure on Britain to make the switch, while the US remains steadfastly month-day-year. Today, Brits are slowly shifting their actual linguistic standards to fit this mold; read any article in a British news outlet, and you're likely to see "March 14th, 2016" written instead as "14 March 2016". Chalk it up to America's innate standoffishness with the rest of the world; the same thing that keeps us using ancient units of measure while the rest of the world uses the much more clean and simple Metric system. But hey, it does come in handy for oddities like Pi Day. Under our system, it comes every year; since there is no 14th month of the year "day-month-year", folks using that system will have to wait until January 3rd, 4159 - under their format, 3/1/4159 - to celebrate a Pi Day of their own. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Photo: Christian Times Republican debates are reliably passionate, and candidates can be counted on to dispense heated words with one another. And sometimes, those heated words aren’t particularly mature – if you need any convincing of this, just look at Trump’s defense of his, um, hands at the last debate. But for language nerds like us, one moment that stood out in the Republican shenanigans happened a couple of weeks ago, and oddly enough, in Spanish.
The drama began about mid—way through a weekend debate, the 10th of the party's seemingly endless procession of debates that, thankfully, seem to be narrowing down. After a good hour or so of bickering, Republican senator Ted Cruz decided to, well, continue bickering – though this time about a favorite issue of his that nonetheless had yet to come up in this particular debate: immigration. Cruz accused his rival Marco Rubio, a fellow second generation Cuban-American (though Cruz would perhaps best be described as Cuban-Canadian-American) of being just a bit too lenient on immigrants. He pointed out that Rubio had gone on Telemundo a few weeks earlier and gave an interview in which he called for amnesty for illegal immigrants in the United States. And to top it off, Rubio gave the interview not in English but in the very un-American language of (gasp!) Spanish. Rubio, despite his penchant for canned responses which earned him the nickname “Marco Roboto”, had a quick response for Cruz: “I don't know how [Cruz] knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish.” Cruz upped the ante, opting to actually respond in Spanish: “I’ll answer you in Spanish right now if you want!” It was perhaps one of the strangest moments of a particularly shouty night for the GOP field. And it also pokes holes in one of my pet theories: that a greater knowledge of languages leads to greater tolerance. After all, the GOP field is actually pretty strong in the language skills department. Both Rubio and Cruz speak Spanish – at least well enough to insult each other en Español. And Jeb Bush, still hanging in the race, speaks fluent Spanish thanks to his Mexican wife. Meanwhile, none of the remaining Democratic candidates speak any other language. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the sizeable Latino population of the US is genuinely convinced by the surface-level nods to their culture. Cruz, Rubio, and Bush may all speak Spanish, but they won’t win over Latinos if they have the wrong message. No matter what language it’s in. Facebook's new reaction icons. Image: Facebook If you’ve been using Facebook over the past few days, you’ve probably noticed that the ubiquitous blue thumbs up “like” button has some company. Hover over the button, or hold it down on a touch screen, and you’ll be offered a whole array of new “reactions”, from cutesy hearts to a red-cheeked grimacing face intended to indicate anger. It’s hard to tell how this is going over. Sure, the fact that “liking” was the only reaction option for Facebook posts for many years (other than actually writing a comment) led to some fun possible alternative proposals: a thumbs down button, or even the more aggressive blue middle finger icon. But the opening up of new options, at least from my own experience, hasn’t led to explosive levels of adoption. Now, a group of linguists is going even farther, claiming that the syntax of the icons is deeply out of whack. Earlier this week, Wired magazine interviewed two linguists to get their take on the new Facebook reaction options. Their biggest gripe was that the words these icons represent are, syntactically, quite diverse. This means that the average Facebook user would have to expend more brainpower than a series of cutesy icons might imply at first. As the article states: “If you click 'Love,' your brain must autocomplete the implied phrase 'I love this.' Fine; just like 'Like.' So far so good. But things get weirder with the adjectives. If you choose 'Sad' or 'Angry,' it’s not 'I sad this' or 'I angry this.' It’s 'This makes me angry,' or 'This makes me sad.' Makes sense! But the mental gymnastics of tweaking this supplied context aren’t easy.” Huh. First off, it’s worth noting that the author of this piece basically disarms the argument being made here within the span of a single paragraph. The syntactic argument for the overcomplicatedness of Facebook reactions is that you can’t “sad something” or “angry” something. But, as it just so happens, you can be made sad or happy by certain things. But what about likes, you can’t be “made like” by things, right? Well perhaps not in English. But when you look at foreign languages, this changes. To give a basic example that probably everyone knows, let’s look at how you say “like” in Spanish: “me gusta”. Though this is the most common way in Spanish to say that you like something, from a literal standpoint, it doesn’t imply that you perform the action of “liking” something, but that that something does the action of making you like it. In English, it would be much more similar to saying something like “it pleases me”. So, with that in mind, “liking” becomes potentially much more similar to “sadding” and “angrying”. For someone who speaks Spanish, for instance, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to connect “this makes me sad”, “this makes me angry”, and “this makes me pleased”. We only perceive it as syntactically different because of how our language is made up. But at the end of the day, all of this is a moot point. The real point of these lovably dumbed down icons is so that we can flip through of dozens of posts at a time and fire off quick, down and dirty reactions to them all at once. Because God forbid we put enough thought into our responses that we might actually have to form complete sentences. |
The Pantera Language Studio BlogUpdates on our language services, and any and/or all of our thoughts on funny, weird, or wild language related stories. Come join the fun! Archives
December 2016
Categories
All
|