A particularly topographically challenged building in Paris has exits to two enclosing streets end up on different floors. The elevator is numbered -2, -1, rez-de-rue [exit north], rez-de-chaussée [exit south], 1, 2, ... .
Don't know French, but I wonder if the meaning of "etage" is similar to Polish "piętro", which literaly means something like "elevation". So, basically in Polish we have a specific word for ground level, and then we count how much elevated above the the ground the current level is. That's why "1st floor" is the one "elevated one level above the ground".
In English you count "floors" and floor is a usable, hard surface on which you can put something, like a chair. That's why a floor on the ground level is treated the same as the floor above it - it is equally good on accommodating chairs, beds, and other stuff.
Etymologically, étage comes from the Greek στέγω (and gave the English word “stage”); it is a typically wooden cover. Since the first floor was often instead a continuation of the outside road (way back!), it was not considered a “stage”.
Yeah, most or all of Europe does that. In English it is called ground floor, first floor, etc. In Swedish the zero numbering makes total sense becasuse instead of numbering the floors we say ground floor, "1 stair", "2 stairs", etc.
That depends on your language and culture, "floor" is not easily translated, some languages have a word describing all the layers added to the base layer, so "1. sal" (Danish as an example) actually means "the first layer added on top of the base house".
Again, this is more a spoken language/culture thing, and this goes back to what premises we use to communicate with the machines, ours or the machines...
No elevator I've seen has yet taken a cue from UI design: simply put the buttons within an outline of the building, along with the local numbering scheme.
No more visits to the serial killer lurking in the basement.
The players in this market evidently have been operating at T'ump levels of intelligence. /s
in Europe or in the US?