Italian counting

Last year, Mark Liberman posted a couple of stories on the Pirahã, an Amazon tribe which apparently had a very limited numbering system. Go read all the articles, as the real story is rather complicated -- but then realize that whatever the Pirahã folks are doing, it's less convoluted than the Italian approach to numbers.

Like many European countries, the Italians make use of C-style indexing for their buildings' floors. That is, the ground floor is numbered "0" instead of "1". In Spain, they call it the planta baja rather than giving the ground floor a number. I didn't come across an equivalent Italian expression, so I assume they use 0 everywhere.

In the United States, when a floor is below ground, it usually gets an alphabetic character to denote that; i.e., basements are numbered B1, B2, etc., parking is P1, P2, and so forth. In Italy, your host encountered a number of elevators numbered like so: -1, -2, etc. Silly Italians -- that's a major programming no-no. If they're going to index their floors like arrays, no out-of-bounds indices!

This is not nearly as bizarre as the numbering scheme employed by Trenitalia for numbering seats. It was so hopelessly convoluted that in order to recall it for later reference, Mrs. SC had to write it down. The background goes like this: in order to get a seat on any train covering more than about 100 km of service distance, you need to reserve a seat by number. They employ two kinds of seating arrangement for this purpose. One organizes seats into compartments of 6, with two rows of 3 facing each other. The numbers go up sequentially across the rows, and continue in order across compartments.

Then there are the trains with seats grouped 8 at a time (with no compartment walls between them). Using the left and right bracket symbols to denote windows, here's how they're arranged:

] 1 3 7 5 [
] 2 8 4 6 [

This repeats across each grouping of 8 seats (the two rows face each other, and the extra space in the middle denotes an aisle). For some odd reason, in spite of the fact that the numbers are never next to each other in sequence, Trenitalia's booking system assigns seats as though they were. Anyone who can come up with a coherent, never mind logical, explanation for this organization will earn my gratitude.

Comments

[ardief]

ground floor is usually known as 'piano terra' (meaning, incidentally, exactly 'ground floor') and i'd say you find T on the elevator button more often than you find 0. just so you know for next time :)

[Semantic Compositions]

I'm not doubting that you know what you're talking about, but I don't recall seeing a T on an elevator. Then again, I only was in 6 elevators over the course of 2 weeks -- in 4 of the 5 hotels we stayed in, one in the Rome airport, and one in the Sorrento Circumvesuviana train station.

The rest of the time, it was stairs. My legs are getting sore just thinking about it.

[Rachel Shallit]

Simple. Draw a dot for each number, then connect the dots in order. Connect 8 back to 1. You have a cute little pattern. They want to bring you back to your childhood days of connecting the dots.

[J. Goard]

Not sure if this consitutes gratitude material, but:

Assuming that traveling pairs tend to prefer sitting across from each other, and that one remove doesn't interfere with such value, the above arrangement is an extremely nerdy improvement upon the straightforward

1 3 5 7
2 4 6 8

in that an 8-1 pairing in included under the above criterion (creating a "ring").

[Vincent Henderson]

I am awed by J. Goard's explanation. It is so beautiful.

As for the floor numbering, all of Europe, as far as I know, uses this way of counting floors, by having floor n°1 as the first one up from ground. In fact, there aren't that many countries where you have to think for five minutes to figure out what all these letters mean before pressing on the button.

[class factotum]

When we were on Sicily, my sister and I stayed with her friend who is stationed at the US Navy base there. It took Colleen weeks to get a phone because the phone guy could never find her house. Why not? Because there are TWO houses with the SAME house number on the SAME street. He kept going to the OTHER 326 Via Roma.