5 ms·
I need someone to explain to me why International Atomic Time = TAI but not IAT
by sunshi23 4y ago
I need someone to explain to me why International Atomic Time = TAI but not IAT
- layer8 4y agoFor a similar reason why Universal Coordinated Time = UTC.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agoThat one's even odder - that's the compromise between the English version, which would be CUT and the French version which would be TUC ... i.e. none of the above.
- emmelaich 4y agoCUT and TUC are probably naughty words in some language. CUT is close the the Dutch kut.
- layer8 4y agoTUC is a brand of crackers well-known in France, so maybe that’s why they didn’t insist on the French version. And CUT obviously didn’t make the cut. ;)
- dontlaugh 4y agoAlso the Trade Union Congress in the UK, of which some of the people involved in the standard may have been members at the time.
- gmiller123456 4y agoThe actual name is French: temps atomique international. I guess we're lucky at least all of the first letters are the same.
- denton-scratch 4y agoCoordinated Universal Time in French is Temps Universel Coordonee (give or take an accent). So that should be TUC. I don't think there's any language in which UTC stands for anything. It's a fake acronym.
- ask_b123 4y agoSimilar reason as the International Organization for Standardization being ISO and not iOS :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization#Name_and_abbreviations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
- jefftk 4y agoI've heard quite a lot of Americans calling it the International Standards Organization
- quesera 4y agoMy favorite example: The same reason that KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) is PFK in Québec... In French: Poulet Frit Kentucky. Honestly, it feels more natural for adjectives to follow the noun. I think about this a lot when naming variables. English is a quirky language.
- cwp 4y agoThe problem with English is that you have to plan out the whole noun phrase in your head before you start talking. Not only do the adjectives have to come first, they have to be in the right order. With Romance languages you can just say the noun and then keep tacking on adjectives as they occur to you.
- Thorrez 4y agoThis seems to disagree with you: >Oddly, languages either have the exact same ordering as English, or the exact opposite as English. And, nouns in various languages fall in some designated position between the string of adjectives -- in English it's at the end, in Romance languages it's somewhere in the middle, such that most adjectives follow the noun, but certain adjectives precede https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/997 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/997
- naniwaduni 4y agoWell yeah, the adjective order is actually mostly semantic, and tracks something similar to intensivity. Varying adjective order is not normally a grammatical error per se, it's emphatic (though emphasizing the wrong thing is a pragmatic error).
- cryptonector 4y agoBut in Romance languages you have to plan out very complex sentences. I mean, you don't have to, but it's what people do. The real answer is that deeply learning grammar as a child makes you think in grammatically correct ways to begin with, which means that when you start vocalizing a sentence, it's already queued up in grammatically correct form or very close to it. This is why we should teach children grammar grammar grammar and almost nothing but grammar, using poetry for memorization, reading to expose them to grammatically-correct texts, and writing to drive grammar home. And some 'rithmetic.
- jmole 4y agoThe same reason the International System of units is referred to as SI, and not IS: the French.