[SllX]

I've been exposed to the Chinese writing system via Japanese, who basically adopted it and made it their own, even perfected it in some ways (e.g. stroke order discipline and SKIP method dictionaries).

It's true the writing system doesn't make it ideal for a global lingua franca, but one of the main advantages I appreciate about it is its ability to disambiguate common strings.

In the Latin+Hindu-Arabic numeral world, we tend to argue about the best way to write dates, everything from 99/9/19 to 2037.04.01 to 4/1 or 13/5/2003 to 5/15/2019. The ISO published a standard, people more or less try to follow it, but in common usage it is still fairly ambiguous.

Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日

Personally I find this to be beautiful in its simplicity. We tend to use a separator anyway, dots or slashes or dashes or what have you, but add one kanji as a suffix and nobody will argue about whether 4/5/2018 is April 5th or May 4th because 日 (once you've learned what it means) will clearly mark the day and 月 will clearly mark the month.

You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

I wouldn't say all of written Chinese would make for a good lingua franca, but a limited subset seeing more use globally would be very cool.

[zaarn]

>Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日

I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.

>You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

Or simply use the ISO standard, which I do and I will assume that people I communicate with understand ISO and parse it correctly. If they don't it's not my problem.

[coldtea]

>I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.

That's not the parent's point though -- if you know the characters, the meaning is immediate. Whereas 2018/02/04 remains opaque.

[Symbiote]

I can't use emoji on here, but you could use them to write the date.

2017Earth04Moon06Sun perhaps.

Or, we already have (but don't use) the astronomical symbols. Most people understand the male and female symbols.

[SllX]

I actually never considered the astronomical symbols, that would work too. Not sure I would use emoji though, I mean, at least with Chinese writing it is still writing and once you know how, they're trivial to write, and in the case of year/day/month, about as trivial as any letter of the alphabet.

[nl]

There's actually a recent precedent for this. The "@" symbol was almost completely unused prior to the late 90's. Email saved it from extinction, but now Twitter and other services have made it a universally understood named-person-entity indicator (which English never had before).

[nkoren]

The 2nd and 3rd hanzi/kanji they used were quite literally the words for "moon" and "sun" (at least in Japanese, where they also mean "month" and "day").

[Symbiote]

That is exactly why I chose them. (我的普通话不好!)

[zeveb]

> You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

Great, now you have n+1 standards …

[SllX]

About 1.5B people give or take already use or are familiar with this standard (Chinese ideographs, not my lame Latin spin on it), so we still only have n standards. This is more about picking one and extending its usage to other locales.

[syrrim]

It already exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Durations