[Uehreka]

> No, we don't.

But practically speaking we usually do. I always hear people refer to events in their life happening “when I was 26” and never “in the 27th year of my life”. Sure you could say the latter, but practically speaking people don’t (at least in English).

[mjmahone17]

“Half one” is archaic English, and common German, for 12:30. Similarly “my 27th year” just sounds archaic to me: I wonder if you went through a bunch of 19th century writing if you’d see ages more often be “Xth year” vs “X-1 years old”.

There may be something cultural that caused such a shift, like a change in how math or reading is taught (or even that it’s nearly universally taught, which changes how we think and speak because now a sizeable chunk of the population thinks in visually written words rather than sounds).

[HPsquared]

A lot of European languages say "I have x years" instead of "I am x years old". It emphasises the "milestone" nature, as in "I have x full years".

[einherjae]

Isn’t “half one” used as a short form of “half past one” these days, I.e. 01:30? That has been a source of confusion for someone used to the Germanic way.

[larusso]

I had this exact topic with an Irish coworker who lives in Germany and has issues to convey the right time. For me as a German „half one“ is half of one so 12:30. Same for „Dreiviertel eins“ -> „threequarter one“ being 12:45 and „Viertel eins“ -> „quarter one“ being 12:15. To be fair the logic behind this is also under constant confusion as some parts of Germany rather use „viertel vor“ or „viertel nach“ -> „quarter to“ „quarter after“ and have no understanding of the three quarter business.

[OJFord]

In the UK yes, I think not in AmE? At least I'm pretty sure they don't say 'quarter to' or 'quarter past', and do say 'a half after'.

(I had some confused conversation with a bus driver once. Bizarre experience to have so much language barrier between two EFL speakers, in English!)

[beAbU]

The Irish like to say "half one" meaning "half past one". In my native timekeeping parlance "half een" means 12h30. Germanic/Dutch origin.

So whenever I talk time with the locals here I repeat the time back in numerical style to avoid confusion.

"The shop opens tomorrow at half ten".

"Thanks, store opens at nine thirty. See you then."

"No..."

[Unbefleckt]

Had no idea myself, my peers, my family and my community used archaic English.

[stavros]

Do you say "half ten" to refer to 9:30? If so, you're using archaic English, yep!

[xg15]

I think of the age number "practically" as the number of "birthday celebrations" I have experienced, excluding the actual day of birth. That's the same as the amount of completed years I've lived on this earth, and one less than the year I'm living in, because that year is not yet completed. (Except of course on birthdays)

But I think this also illustrates just how averse our culture is to using zero-indexing in counts: The age number absolutely is zero-indexed - a baby before before the first birthday is zero years old. But no one calls it like that, instead we drop the year count entirely and fall back to the next-largest nonzero unit, i.e. we say the baby is so-and-so-many months old. And for newborns not yet a month old, we count in weeks, etc.

I think, culturally, it's not that surprising as this method of counting is older than the entire concept of "zero". But I think it shows that there is little hope of convincing a large number of non-nerd people to start counting things with zeros.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

That's not really indexing from 0 though. It's just rounding the amount of time you've lived down to the nearest year. You get the same number, but semantically you're saying roughly how old you are, not which year you're in. This becomes obvious when you talk to small children, who tend to insist on saying e.g "I'm 4 and a half". And talking about children in their first year, no one says they're 0. They say they're n days/weeks/months old.

[SllX]

In an indirect manner, we do mark having lived the 27th year in the following forms, we just don’t say it exactly the way you phrased it:

1. On your 26th Birthday, when you say you turned 26 what it means is that you have now lived 26 years. People generally understand this, even if they are going to be spending the next year saying they are 26.

2. It is not uncommon for people to demarcate their age on their birthday in revolutions around the Sun, as a kind of meme. “I’ve now traveled around the Sun twenty-six times.” or something like that, when reflecting on their lives on their Birthday.

The colloquial usage is our legally-defined age. A shortcut for our laws to take, the age-gating ones anyway. It hasn’t replaced our cultural understanding of what the first year of our life actually was.