this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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I did a quick search, it seems it's similar to imperial and metric in that it's only the US doing 1st floor as ground floor. It's for various reasons, but in most European languages the word used for the numbered "floors" either means "horizontal division between floors" or the first "construction over the previous floor", so it makes sense that the first is the first above the ground.
It's like the basement, the ground floor is special.
Rez-de-chaussée is the ground floor in France. Go one level up and you're on premier étage, a.k.a first floor.
In sweden första våningen, a.k.a first floor, is the entry level of the building.
I actually found this map for it, it's apparently divided between the world pretty evenly.
I mentioned elsewhere that some stuff is lost in translation here: In Norwegian we don't say "I'm on the first floor", we either say "I'm in the first storey" or "I'm on the ground-level". For subsequent floors we use "I'm in X storey". I don't know how this works in other languages, but it would be strange if Norwegian was the only language where we use the storey to specify where something is, rather than the floor (i.e. using "in" rather than "on").
Well Sweden is wrong already :-)
But you can have multiple levels of basement.
And it's numbered different building to building, sometimes level 1 is nearest to surface, sometimes it's the deepest one.
And if you think that's confusing, I've ridden this one elevator once, it had four buttons arranged in a square: "P", "FSZT", "MFSZT", "1E". Guess what order the floors are in.
Fuggit, I needed the exercise from taking the stairs anyways.
This was a building in Budapest, "P" stands for "pince", as in basement, "FSZT" is "földszint", literally "ground floor", "MFSZT" is "magasföldszint", "high ground floor" meaning mezzanine level, and "1E" is "1. emelet", "first elevation", so that was highest.
The quality of the elevator still made me think of taking the stairs though.
Fun fact, Hungarian is the only language I've heard of that uses Latin letters and also has multi-glyph letters as long as four glyphs, so "sz" is considered one letter like in Polish I think, but "ddzs" is also one letter.
I've heard that it has the historical explanation that back in time, the ground floor was often literally the ground, so the first floor was actually the first floor. Don't know if that's correct, but I seem to remember having heard/read it somewhere.
It might be, the whole étage thing has been loanworded to hell by a lot of languages, it might come from that.
Ah so they don't call floors floors...they call the space floor.
Which is completely dumb haha.
They might call it "first elevation" for example.
It's just different words.