I have a question concerning grammar for the general Freeping public. Does anyone know the "why" behind the divergence of certain matters of punctuation between citizens of Great Britain and her former colonies? Specifically:
at 7.10 one evening, racing round in response, arriving at 7.50 and then waiting until 1.20 in the morning
We Yanks use a colon (:) as a delimiter between hours and minutes when marking time, whereas Brits, Canucks, and Aussies seem to prefer a period (.).
A similar difference exists when denoting values greater than 100. i.e., in Britain, you would write 1.000.000, whereas we would think that odd, and prefer a comma to separate our hundreds, thousands, and millions.
It's just something trival that I don't really know the history of. Are there any Freepers who would like to hit me on the head with a cluebat?
It is just different. In all of Europe large numbers use a period, whereas we use a comma. On dates and times they use periods also. To make it more confusing the Euros write the date with the day being first and month second. Today is 14.6.05. Also million and billion mean entirely different things.