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. The five candidates for the Democratic Primary at the October debate in Nevada. Photo: CNN After two Republican primary debates, and significant difficulty in accommodating the massive Republican field - which ended up with the creation of a separate debate for unpopular candidates rather embarrassingly named the "kid's table" - it was finally time for the Democrats to have their own debate. And thanks to the fact that the debate was broadcast on CNN, we took the liberty of watching it (or at least part of it) on CNN's Spanish language affiliate. What we found out was truly astounding. Okay, not really. But here goes anyway.
1. "Debate" in Spanish is "debate". And "CNN" in Spanish is "CNÑ" Though many native English speakers balk at the idea of learning Spanish, learning to understand debates is surprisingly easy. And by that I mean that learning to understand the word "debate" in Spanish is surprisingly easy - it's spelled exactly the same in Spanish, though pronounced differently: "day-bah-tay". But for some reason, CNN has branded itself in Spanish as "CNÑ". What does that stand for, Cable News Ñetwork"? What is a ñetwork anyway? With the ñ, it would be pronounced "nyetwork" which makes it sound oddly Russian. 2. Bernie Sanders sounds weird dubbed with a Castilian accent For much of the debate, Bernie Sanders was shown as making his speech dubbed with a voice speaking in a Castilian (i.e. Spanish from Spain) accent. For me, it was a kind of weird cognitive dissonance - almost as if one of the candidates for US president had started speaking in a British accent. I joked on Twitter that Bernie en español was urging listeners that "nethethitamos mas regulathiones" (we need more regulations). And when asked about Wall Street, I was half expecting the Spanish dub to blurt out "joder, tío!" - which for US English speakers would be the equivalent of hearing "bloody rubbish, mate!" 3. Interpreting a debate is reallllly hard Sure, the candidates were all under pressure to do their best in the debate. But the Spanish interpreters had an equally difficult job of trying to capture distinctly English-language phraseology and slang in a way Spanish speakers could get. And often, it just wasn't possible, even for the seasoned team of interpreters CNN (or should I say, CNÑ) put together. At one point, it sounded to me like one of them was gasping for breath. 4. Spanish speakers outside the US are shocked that American women don't get maternal leave Later in the debate, Hillary scored a few points by mentioning the fact that, at the federal level, the US is sorely lacking in paid maternity leave for women. This is a fact that's staggering, especially when you look at how maternity leave is handled in Spanish-speaking countries around the world, most of which have more robust maternal leave laws than the US. 5. Latinos haven't made up their minds about the Democratic candidates yet CNÑ's post-debate coverage featured a number of interviews with Spanish-speaking Americans, pretty much all of them Latinos. And the overwhelming consensus among them was that they hadn't made their minds up yet. Though the Democratic party is generally seen as being friendlier to Latinos, Republicans have the advantage in that some of their candidates are actually Latino. However, it remains to be seen whether this actually means they will be better for the general Latino population - Ted Cruz, for instance, is know for his bombastic anti-Mexican statements (and also for trying to ingratiate himself to Republican voters by cooking bacon with a machine gun). |
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
|