Date formats would really only require three:

- 年: year

- 月: month

- 日: day

We debate about both separators and order of presentation, but using three characters as suffixes would add some semantics where none really existed, and you might have to make some assumptions about which way the day goes and which way the month goes.

For those that don’t know, 3月 is March, 12月 is December, 31日 is the 31st day and 2019年 is the current year. So April 12th 2019 which might be presented as 2019.04.12, 4/12/2019 or 12/4/2019 would instead be written as 2019年4月12日 or 12日4月2019年 or even 4月12日2019年.

The beauty here is the ideographs provide enough semantic meaning on their own that the order of presentation stops mattering and they are perfectly fine date separators. They are always appended as suffixes to the numeric designator and they don’t add much to the cognitive burden for anyone learning how to read. We already mix Arabic numerals into just about every writing system, Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, et cetera, we have distinct punctuation marks in most writing systems, and we pretty much all know the difference between $12.34 and £12.34 and how 56¢ differs from 56%.

This is a small example, but I hope it provides some context to some who don’t know any kanji the power and precision that ideographs can provide at a glance.

One more thing, while I offered up these three specific ideographs specifically as date separators, they do provide standalone meanings as well.

年 is a counting word for years. It doesn’t have to be AD, and in Japanese or Chinese they do have their own calendars, but 2019年 is still unambiguously understood to be 2019 anno domini.

月 is a standalone word for the moon, which is functionally why it is used as a month counter. 日 is a standalone word for the Sun. This perfectly preserves the association between months to the moon cycle and days to the solar cycle, which I think is pretty cool, and it certainly does so a lot better than mere dots or slashes or dashes.