Which cultures are big-endian?

Question

I do not really know where to post such a question, so please bear with me if you think there were a better stackexchange for it.

Endianness refers to how we order elements from multiple scales. As such, ordering from coarser to finer scales is called big-endian ; the opposite is called little-endian.

The Wikipedia article discusses merely about its implications in computer architecture, but its scope is actually much broader and we can find it in everyday life.

Indeed, I identified at least four instances where endianness matters :

• personal identity : should we put first name before or after last name ? Well, obviously English language itself answers the question (in a little-endian way), but many Asian countries beg to differ ;
• dates : should we write day/month/year (little-endian) or year-month-day (big-endian) ?
• addresses : should we write Number Street City Country (little-endian) or Country City Street Number (big-endian) ?
• numbers obviously : we usually agree to write that half a kilometre is 0.5 km (big-endian), but we could have convened to write 5.0 km (little-endian) ; for instance, Arabic speakers do write 0.5 km, but read it from right to left, hence in a little-endian way.

From a psychological point of view, endianness is about choosing between prioritising global or local. Let me explain.

If you're asking someone today's date, you probably actually are just asking what day it is. You are likely very well aware of current year and even month, and as such not interested in them. One might reply "It is the fourth" without any further detail and you would be perfectly fine with this answer. You are interested in the finer scale as it helps you precise locally. This is little-endian logic.

As an opposed example, if you are a bit interested in Roman history, you will probably learn that its Western part fell in 476, but you probably won't even try to memorise the specific month, not to say the specific day. This is big-endian logic, where coarser scale helps you precise globally. Likewise, if you want to chronologically sort old administrative papers (say, paid bills) which span over more than a decade, you will first look for years, then months, and finally days. Maybe you won't even be interested in the day if it isn't necessary for you to sort. Which is why international norm for date time notation (ISO 8601) is big-endian.

Except for numbers, Western countries are mostly little-endian. Few exceptions include United States and Germany, which are sometimes quite weird using what we could call middle-endian (basically meaning there is no logic at all), respectively for dates and addresses.

Also, German would read « 132 » as « ein hundert zwei und dreißig » (litteraly « one hundred two and thirty ») which is middle-endian again, as opposed to English which is big-endian here (reading hundreds, then tens, then units).

However, Chinese people seem to be big-endian for all of these four aforementioned subjects. Which other countries or cultures also are fully big-endian ?

Is there any culture which is fully little-endian ?

Answer 1

This is potentially a very interesting question, but it suffers from conflation of “language”, “culture”, and “country”. It is the same sort of confusion that happens when people who do not speak gendered languages imagine that French people think their hands are female (la main) and their feet are male (le pied). I assure you that they do not.

To take just one of your examples: British English says day/month/year, while US English says month/day/year. Here 9/11 is the 9th of November, but there it is the 11th of September. Does this say anything at all about mentality or culture? I think not. Like most things in language this is merely a matter of convention.

Answer 2

One example of endianness in language is the traditional Welsh vigesimal counting system, and its Celtic counterparts in Cornish, Breton and Gaelic.

To give examples, the number 34 would be expressed as pedwar ar ddeg ar hugain (four on ten on twenty), and the number 97 would be saith ar ddeg ar bedair ugain (seven on ten on four twenties).

This is not common to all vigesimal systems, as French would describe the latter number as quatre-vingt-dix-sept (four twenties, ten, seven).

This does not extend into all aspects of the language. Names were traditionally described as 'X son/daughter of Y' (e.g. Dafydd ap Gwilym), similar to the O' and Mac prefixes of Irish and Scottish families and clans.

Answer 3

Endianness is not a natural concept at all. Nature itself cannot care less about endianness, in the same way that it cannot care less about square roots. They are human-made abstract concepts, to help them (the humans) to explain the nature around them.

Endianness is especially related to computers because there everything has to be properly sorted, explained, findable etc. It is 100% scientific.

On the other hand, there are few things less scientific than languages. That is why it is many time almost impossible to translate one text from a language into another text in another language - because the structure of the languages is as original and varied as the people who created those languages.

I will give you some examples that clearly show that analyzing languages with endianness is not going to end well:

1. The US notation for dates is MM / DD / YY - that is middle / small / big - is that little endian or big endian?
2. Numerals in German - they write 123 and read "one hundred 3 and twenty". Which endianness is it when they read? As far as I understand, there was a habit in English to treat numbers like this also (at least according to the "old" English books that I read). So while there is some endianness in writing, there is no endianness in reading.
3. The French language. They write 99 and read "four times twenty and ten and nine". Please try to guess the endianness of that text.
4. Roman numerals! 11 = XI = 10+1, while 9 = IX = -1+10. Mixed endianness again.

Bottom line: languages are not good or bad. They just are - like trees and like stars. The issue here is that endianness is not the proper tool for the analysis of languages.

Consider the following (jocular) questions:

• how many meters of water are in a bottle?
• how many liters of water does the Amazon river have at coordinates (X,Y).

That is the result of using good tools for unsuitable jobs.