Coworker's question about commas versus decimal points

A fellow employee posted this on our local mail alias. I figured someone actually FROM England could answer him definitively:



I'm going to direct him to this thread.

Ignoring the obvious distinction between a Brit and someone from England...

I have never seen 1,5 used in the UK, I was always taught 1.5 which I say as "one point five".

Now, the French are a different kettle of fish altogether, I always thought it was they who used a comma in place of a decimal point.

We use commas to indicate groups of 3 digits in large numbers, eg. 1,234,567.8 is "one million two hundred and thirty-four thousand five hundred and sixty seven point eight" At least it is as far as I was taught, (non-English) Brit that I am

We don't swap millions and billions either, but historically, a billion over here was one million million, not one thousand million. We pretty much accept the smaller value now, but if you were a proper billionaire in the UK, suffice to say you could buy Bill Gates before breakfast and still have change for a decent lunch in the Dorchester

I suspect your friend is confusing GB with that other country called Europe*.

It is "point" as in "one point five" here. We always use the "decimal point" (period character) to separate wholes from fractions, never a comma. A comma doesn't make any sense, except as a thousands separator.

As far as expressing fractions goes, my experience is that that is down to age and arithmetic awareness. Specifically; we measure distance here more in millimeters than we do inches (but we measure long distances while driving in miles!). People more accustomed to dealing with inches tend to be more used to fractions; 1/8th, 3/16th etc. Similarly, those people will recognise values like 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and express them as "quarter", "half" and "three quarters".

* - While working for a number of American owned multi-national companies I realised that some Americans thought Europe was a country. Taking this into account, it's not difficult to imagine how some Americans might mistakenly think that the 'European' use of "comma" as a whole/decimal separator would also apply to the UK. Incidentally, and anecdotally, I couldn't actually tell you what European countries use comma as a decimal point!

According to my MacOS I10n System Preference Pane, the US, the UK, and Ireland all use the same number punctuation (save currency symbols, obviously).

The French use the comma as the decimal delimiter and a space as a thousands delimiter.

Portugal: 1.234,56
Spain: 1.234,56
France: 1 234,56
Belgium: 1.234,56
Netherlands: 1.234,56
Germany: 1.234,56
Austria: 1.234,56
Italy: 1.234,56
Switzerland: 1'234.56
Denmark: 1.234,56
Norway: 1 234,56
Sweden: 1 234,56
Finland: 1 234,56
UK: 1,234.56
Ireland: 1,234.56

That's most of Western Europe.

The Germans swap the comma and 'period' marks from what the rest of us are used to.

Eins komma drei = 1,3 => one point three = 1.3

Thousand separators are 'period marks'.
So, $2,945.23 would be $2.945,23.

Instead of 'Billion' they say (sorry, I can only manage my own poor phonetic version on this) 'mil-yard-en'.

And, as a side note, they measure blood alcohol level in thousandths (german= 'pro mil') instead of hundredths (english= 'percent')

Fun, huh?

edit:
Oh- and Bitt edits his post with tons more info for all across Europe while I'm feebly putting mine up. fine then. grumblegrumble

Heh. Those Americans

Your Mac is correct; although I didn't know about those crazy Swiss...

"Just shy of 4 and three-quarters, and what's that comma doing there? Do I look foreign?"

Thanks all for the replies (I'm Tony's friend from work). Having suffered through a cold rainy Seattle spring a vision of my trip to Italy last fall popped into my head on Friday as I was typing up a number and accidentally hit the comma rather than the period, leading somewhat circuitously to my question. Sorry to lump Great Britain in with the continent - I should have known better, what with the millimeters and miles and the driving on the left and all. And what's up with the Swiss??? Although I gotta say, from a mathematical perspective it kinda makes sense to use a (sort of) superscript to separate powers of ten.

Being a McNeill myself with a family tree full of Scots I was amused by the "Brit" vs. "English" comments. Coincidentally I'm just now reading a book on the Scottish Enlightenment and the Acts of Union of 1707, which made the English and Scots all officially "Brits". It was kind of funny and a little sad that some of the pro-union Scots wanted to call themselves "North Britons" while you'd have been hard pressed to find an Englishman willing to forgo "English" for "South Briton". But anyway, it was a fascinating century for Scotland - I'm not quite sure what it says about my ancestors that that's right about the time they all decided to migrate to North Carolina.

Eric

They knew a better place when they heard about it.