Gregory's Server@Ash_Crow @whknott @IHasWisdom For context, in common use people use centimeters (small things), millimeters (tiny things or precision measurements), and meters (big things). Decimeters is almost never used. People's height is often given as "1 meter 78 centimeters" or just "1 meter 78".
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@Ash_Crow @whknott @IHasWisdom Just because a unit of measurement is decimal, doesn't mean people think and talk in scientific numeric prefixes and "ten exponent five" and whatnot. People find a few reliable linguistic landmarks and use that with a shared understanding, in any culture. @Ash_Crow @whknott @IHasWisdom It just happens that the linguistic landmarks used (mostly cm, m and km) are on a single decimal scale, which you learn in school, unlocking extra power for *some* use cases.  @fvsch @whknott @IHasWisdom yup, in practice I've only seen/heard decimeter used to give the size of rulers (double or triple decimeter : 20 or 30 cm ruler) @Ash_Crow @whknott @IHasWisdom I also suspect that units like "centimeter" and "kilometer" are less palatable in English because they have 4 syllables, vs 3 in French. And I always suspected that three syllables is a bit of a hard limit for linguistic popularity (but I haven't checked that at all). |
@Ash_Crow @whknott @IHasWisdom So in practice it works very much like how Americans use inches (small things), fractions of inches (tiny things and precision measurements), and feet (larger things).