That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.

Starting with the most general and ending with the most specific is a logical order. Doing it the other way round is also logical. But starting with the middle makes no sense.

It doesn’t seem unusual to you because you use it often.

That said I’m German and I realize that German postal addresses are crazy for the same reason. I wish we‘d adopt the Chinese format: country first then province (state), then County then town then neighborhood then street and house.

German addresses are middle endian: street then house number then zip code then city then country. The right order seems to be: city, zip, street, house number. Most general to most specific.

What's so crazy about the German notation? Seems to make perfect sense, as it goes line-by-line from the smallest to the largest sorting unit:

1. Exact street location (street + house)

2. District (postal code)

3. City

4. Country

Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over country and city names every time before reaching the bit they actually need.

The house number is smaller than the street, but the street comes first. If we put the house number first, then we'd get a logical order.

You're thinking of street and house number as two things. Germans don't. Or at least I don't. Your approach makes as much sense as picking movie titles with numbers at the end apart into two things.

Street and house number are certainly two different things. It's more like series of movies (Die Hard 1, Die Hard 2, etc. are different movies but part of the same series. In the same way, a street could be seen as a series of houses or addresses. So the smallest unit is the house, then the street.

Yes, it's like a movie series. It's Die Hard 2. That's one name, not two, "2" and "Die Hard", but one: "Die Hard 2".

I didn't say it was two names, I said there are two different movies within the Die Hard series. Just like two different houses on the same street.

Yes, but each movie is a single entity and the number is part of that entity. Just like with "street+house number". It's one entity, not two.

I think he meant, that the street name is before the house number

You listed two details on one line to make the German notation seem non-crazy.

A more "logical" notation, as per the gp's comment would start:

1. Exact street location (house + street)

In Poland We do it exactly as you said:

Street_name street_number/house_number

Postal_code, City, Country

The typical English-influenced way to do it starts with the number,the most specific thing.

  10 Downing Street
  London
  SW1A 2AA

(The postcode is least-specific first: SW is South West London, 1 is the district nearest Central London, and the 2 would usually be a few streets and the AA 5-10 houses, but this is a unique code for an address that gets a lot of post.)

Funnily enough, with the addition of the newest element to that format — the postcode — to the end, this format also becomes less "logical", postcode being very specific.

Of course that's arguable, as postcode shouldn't really be considered a component of-, rather an alternative to- other sections of the address.

A postcode (or local equivalent) isn't necessarily particularly specific. For example, here in Austria the equivalent of a postcode might cover a whole city district.

Yes, similar to the US. But British post codes (or at least the ones I’ve seen in London) are in fact very specific.

Indeed, a single postcode in the UK will contain (on average) about 20 addresses and (usually) only refer to a single street.

ZIP+4 in the US is quite specific, though. E.g., my ZIP code is probably > 50k people but the ZIP+4 is just my apartment building.

You are missing the name of the house resident as the first line. Once I had my mail returned to the sender because my parents-in-law did not put our name on the envelope.

For something like addresses, usage pattern is going to matter... if most mail is sent within the city, then putting street first makes sense, because the city is almost always the same; it shouldn't take up valuable real estate at the front of the address.

The broadest unit that is likely to change going first makes sense.

> That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.

The english language—and every other real-world spoken language—is full of rules and exceptions that make absolutely zero logical sense. How far down this road do you want to go?

As long as we speak in a specific order, I don't think it's crazy at all to write in that same order. After all, normal written sentences follow the spoken order of words, too.

Hungarian addresses are (or were) worse. According to http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/, it's:

1. name of recipient, 2. town name, 3. street address or post box number, 4. four digit postal code.

(I have a vague memory of seeing that sort of order in German, too, in a historical context, but perhaps it was from Austria-Hungary.)

Or from botton to top: country, city, zip, housenumber, street, name.

> We say "February second, 2020" ...

Interesting. We (Australian) say "Second of Feb, 2020". ;)

In Dutch we say "2 februari 2020". So littleendian is perfectly natural for us.

Spanish is "Dos de Febrero de 2020"

What about the Fourth of July then?

I don’t know, I always imagined that you said “4th of July” because up to that point you were Brits and that’s how we say it.

...and then the very next day, without adult supervision, you started saying your dates weirdly and dropping the “u”s out of words, stuff like that.*

* DISCLAIMER: May not be an accurate representation of history. :P

It's more accurate than it might sound. If I recall correctly, the American spelling reforms were largely a one-man top-down effort driven by the ideological goal of being more separate from Britain.

It's commonly referred to as "Simplified English" for good reason. ;)

> I always imagined that you said “4th of July” because up to that point you were Brits

True, but nowadays we say "Independence Day" :-)

Macy’s call it 4th of July

https://www.macys.com/shop/4th-of-july-sale

You can say any date like that in American English, it’s just less common. “Today is the second of February” sounds perfectly natural, but I’d be more likely to say “Today is February second”.

As in everything else in American English, there are exceptions.

What about it? It's the name of a holiday.

12/25 is often called Christmas, and yet 9/29 is never called Michaelmas. Same thing.

The parent was making the point that generally Americans refer to dates such as "May 2nd", "April 14th".

But one of their biggest holidays is explicitly called "4th of July", changing the ordering.

And a proper name is not good evidence of normal usage. "Christmas" is normal use in an older, Catholic method of identifying calendar dates. Americans don't use that method; most couldn't if they wanted to. But Christmas itself is still identified that way for historical reasons -- the word has gone from being an example of talking about the calendar to being an example of a proper name.

"4th of July" is not a method that Americans couldn't use if they wanted to, but it is an ossified usage that doesn't reflect how Americans generally refer to dates. Like Christmas, it is a proper name of limited evidentiary value.

Huh, where I'm from the 24th of December is Christmas. The 25th is the day after Christmas.

Really? Where are you from?

This might help explain how Santa delivers all those presents in "one night".

Possibly it's the difference between being an atheist and a catholic, since I faintly remember my catholic friends receiving presents on the morning of the 25th, while I would receive them on the evening of the 24th.

Opening presents on Christmas Eve is a pretty common tradition.

Calling Christmas Eve "Christmas" is not common at all.

Interesting. Are you from Canada?

I'm from Europe, but not from an English speaking country.

Chicken and egg. I (in British English) say the second of February.

I would agree that there's influence in both directions between the written pattern and the usual manner of speech. All I'm saying here is that there's nothing surprising about the written pattern matching the usual manner of speech. That is the primary purpose of writing; it's weirder for the writing not to match the speech. (Although certainly not unheard of; it is the norm in e.g. Chinese.)

Unfortunately, you're using an idiosyncratic American "usual manner of speech" to justify an idiosyncratic American format.

And the problem with that is... what? Are you saying we should all speak Chinese because spoken Chinese dates go in correct sorting order?

Idiosyncratic? Of course. People in different countries speak differently. Every natural language is totally arbitrary and “idiosyncratic”. What is your point?

The assertion that most people and most countries in spoken language say “day [of] month”, which I find anecdotally accurate, although that’s mainly in European countries and languages

This matches why almost every country in the world uses “d/m/y” in normal usage.

If you were aware of the mind-boggling diversity of human language you would not make claims like “typical languages do X so one that doesn’t is idiosyncratic” (unless backed by serious research spanning the thousands of known languages). You would also not think experience with a few languages from the Indo-European family is generalizable.

Standard Chinese for example uses Y/M/D and I’m sure you can find many examples of other formats.

I think the only major language using the M, D, Y spoken order are American-influenced English and Ewe (Ghana etc).

Several countries write a short data as M/D/Y, but these mostly have a significant American influence.

The claim was "almost every country in the world uses d/m/y in normal usage", which doesn't pass the laugh test.

It wasn't "almost every country in the world doesn't use m/d/y", even if you would have liked it to be.

British English? Which part of the UK is that from.

I speak English English.