ceb@csli.stanford.edu (Charles Buckley) (07/08/89)
Kenneth R. Jongsma writes recently in Telecom Digest 9(224)1/11: >This [kind of thing] started bothering me when I first heard France >was going to eight digit numbers a few years back. It's probably >just my American Provincialism, but it seems as if "the rest of the >world" is ignoring the Bell Labs studies on how easy it is recall >numbers. I figured it was the French desire to [be] different from >the rest of the world, even though they had already implemented the >equivilent (sic) of an area code (city codes). Now the Japanese are >going that way. I don't know about Japan, but the French decision to go to 8-digit codes is easy to understand. In French, you don't read single digits out, but you give them by two. Thus, the number 67.54.78.94 is read out "sixty-seven fifty-four sixty-eighteen eighty-fourteen". The norm was the 6-digit number, but when there were 7 digit numbers in Paris, this was unconfortable: the number 597.25.17 was read "five-hundred-eighty-seventeen twenty-five seventeen", which is not noticeably less work than the 8-digit example. Splitting off the 5 would tend to get it confused as a city code (especially by Belgians, whose city codes are that short). It was simply aesthetically pleasing to return to an even number of digits - it allowed people to talk about telephone numbers "normally" again. Even the French special numbers come in groups of 2 - information is 12 (I believe), long distance is 16, videotex is 36 15, etc. - only when you go international do you have to worry about lonely digits. I keep expecting to see telephones for the French market with 100 buttons on a 10 by 10 grid, but I guess you'd have to have some confusing feature for international service, so it probably wouldn't go over well. As far as the Bell study is concerned, I wasn't around at the time, but I'm sure that it had the single-digit American parochialism built-in. Who's to say how this influenced the results? I do agree that there should be more flexibility in number lengths. Germany is a good example - they have 3 digit area codes and up to 8 digit numbers for the big cities, and 5 digit area codes with down to 3 digit telephone numbers for the smallest towns, plus anything in between. More important numbers are often shorter than those of individual subscribers. As the town grows, they discretely hang single digits on the fronts of old numbers as needed, or some such thing. They will never run out of numbers (unlike the US). The inappropriate rigidity of the American 7-digit system is well demonstrated on one extreme by the relatively traumatic phenomenon of area code splitting in big cities, and on the other by a local radio ad I heard once passing through a small town in rural America: " . . . that's Mabry's Drugstore, First Street n' Depot Avenue, for all your prescription needs, call 582- hmm! (crash, boom, rustle, rustle) - 'scuse me whahl I look up the number - (shuffle shuffle) call 582-1478 for Mabry's Drugs. Movin' now to the obituaries . . . "
sean@uunet.uu.net (Sean Phelan) (07/10/89)
In addition to the way numbers in French are spoken as two-digit pairs,
it is helpful to remember that Paris does not have a "downtown core"
which fades slowly out to endless suburbs. You are either IN PARIS
or you're not ( in which case you are in the banlieue <sp?> ). If you
are in Paris, you have an eight digit number, starting with 4.
Property prices, and to a certain extent pace of life, respect this
sharp dividing line between being in the city and outside it. Try
walking though the flea-market at Porte de Clingangcourt, starting
from the Paris side and leaving on the northern side, to experience this.
I think the peripherique ( ring-road ) more or less follows the boundaries
of the city, but I'm not certain.
Sean ( being francophile again )
--
Sean Phelan | "Education furnishes the mind,
Geac Computer, Markham, Ontario | making it a pleasant place to
sean@geac | spend the rest of one's life"
{uunet!mnetor,yunexus,unicus,utgpu}!geac!sean |