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Previous Thread Next Thread Print Thread Page 1 of 2 1 2 What do you call... #39350 08/23/01 07:47 PM Joined: May 2000 Posts: 10 R reed OP stranger OP reed stranger R Joined: May 2000 Posts: 10 What do you call it when, for example, you arrange by phone to rent a car, and the operator says "Your confirmation number is H as in Harry..." What's the term for the H as in Harry part, and what are the some of the standard lists giving A as in Able, X as in X-ray, and so on? Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: What do you call... #39351 08/23/01 07:59 PM Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 13,803 Faldage Carpal Tunnel Faldage Carpal Tunnel Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 13,803 In the Navy that was referred to as phonetic spelling and the alphabet as the phonetice alphabet. That and $5.00 will get you a cup of coffee at the next linguists convention. Alfa Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey X-ray Yankee Zulu Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: What do you call... #39352 08/23/01 08:06 PM Joined: Nov 2000 Posts: 1,289 B Bobyoungbalt veteran Bobyoungbalt veteran B Joined: Nov 2000 Posts: 1,289 Faldage, do you by any chance know why Greenwich Mean Time is called Zulu time? It would seem more logical to call it Alpha time. Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: What do you call... #39353 08/23/01 08:08 PM Joined: Mar 2000 Posts: 6,511 lower upstate New York AnnaStrophic Carpal Tunnel AnnaStrophic Carpal Tunnel Joined: Mar 2000 Posts: 6,511 lower upstate New York What's the phonetice alphabet? Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter And what do you call... #39354 08/23/01 08:12 PM Joined: Mar 2000 Posts: 6,511 lower upstate New York AnnaStrophic Carpal Tunnel AnnaStrophic Carpal Tunnel Joined: Mar 2000 Posts: 6,511 lower upstate New York ... the guy who heads up the US Joint Chiefs of Staff? The chief Chief? Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: Phonetice #39355 08/23/01 08:15 PM Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 13,803 Faldage Carpal Tunnel Faldage Carpal Tunnel Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 13,803 Oops Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: Zulu time #39356 08/23/01 08:24 PM Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 13,803 Faldage Carpal Tunnel Faldage Carpal Tunnel Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 13,803 Alfa's the next one east. They go all the way up to Mike (UTC+12) going east and Yankee (UTC-12) going west. Additionally Zild and Fiji are +13 and Kiribati and Tonga are +14. Go figure. But there is a certain logic there; Alfa is UTC+1, makes sense in a certain way. Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: What do you call... #39357 08/24/01 08:36 AM Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 393 London N NicholasW enthusiast NicholasW enthusiast N Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 393 London I think the Z is for Zero. Astronomers notate UTC (= GMT) as e.g. 0800 Z, for explicitness, whereas other time zones are 0800 +5 where the 0800 refers to UTC and the +5 is what's needed to convert to local time. Reading of the Z as Zulu and the application of the Alpha words to other zones would then be secondary. Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: What do you call... #39358 08/24/01 10:44 AM Joined: Jan 2001 Posts: 1,156 B Bean old hand Bean old hand B Joined: Jan 2001 Posts: 1,156 other time zones are 0800 +5 where the 0800 refers to UTC and the +5 is what's needed to convert to local time. I think it might be the other way around. I don't know if anyone here still uses good ol' Pine for email. I do, and it stamps emails as follows: hh:mm:ss (-ttt) The hh:mm:ss is local time of the person who wrote it, and the stuff in brackets is how to translate their time to UTC. Anyway, I figured the guys who programmed Pine probably followed some sort of standard way of telling time across time zones. Maybe, or maybe not. *Edit: I take that back. Everyone else doesn't necesarily WRITE in Pine, but when I read in Pine, that info is there. So the mail servers are the ones which stamp it like that, I guess. Copy Link to Clipboard Share Post on Facebook Share Post on Twitter Re: What do you call... #39359 08/24/01 11:14 AM Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 393 London N NicholasW enthusiast NicholasW enthusiast N Joined: Dec 2000 Posts: 393 London I wasn't sure whether what I'd said was true, so I've tracked it down again. (I did once research this, and was going on memory.) An overview of different time systems is at http://sadira.gb.nrao.edu/~rfisher/Ephemerides/times.html More detail is at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part3/ Neither of those answers the question of timezone notation. But ISO 8601 does, and that can be found explained at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html I'm posting this at 2001-08-24 12:12Z and my local time is 12:12 + 01:00 (meaning 1.12 p.m.) because we're on British Summer Time here. The Z does stand for "zero meridian", i.e. Universal Time (formerly called Greenwich Mean Time). But yes, e-mails arrived postmarked at your local time (if you can get the jolly thing to work) so they use a notation effectively the reverse of that for local convenience. 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