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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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It's the first floor above the ground level (or the first floor that you have to start calling a separate name, because if everything is single level you don't need to specify a floor).
Yeah, so the first EXTRA floor. Fine. If that's the way they do it, but I wouldn't call it better.
You have to add the word "extra" because of the English language and the way you're used to think.
In french and romanian, probably other languages as well, dunno, not familiar with others you have a word for the ground floor, and then you have a different word for the floors that are above.
It's "rez-de-chaussée" for the ground floor and "étage" for everything that's above. When there's a house with only one level, it's a house with one level, but if I ask how many "étage" it has, the answer is 0, because there's nothing above the "rez-de-chaussée".
It's like.. try to replace "floor" with "flight of stairs" or something. To better conceptualize the manner of speaking. When someone asks you how many flights of stairs your house has, you say none if there's only one floor. And you say 1 if there's 2 floors. That sort of thing.
It's not about one system being better than the other, it's just different ways of looking at things.
I believe it's the same in German. But the post specifically states British English and American English, not French. Just sayin.
Also you bring up a new point that has always confused me. Flights of stairs. What is that? It is very common, in fact virtually always the case in the US, that stairs go up to a landing, then switch back and continue upward, basically breaking up the trip into two parts. I've never known if a "flight" is one of those two pieces or the whole trip. Something tells me it's both.
British English might have continental Europe influences there whereas American English doesn't? Dunno, don't have an explanation for the difference.
As for the "flight", I've always wondered that myself, but never bothered to googled it. Simply assumed it was used for both. Just googled it now, and the consensus seems to be that a flight is an uninterrupted row of stairs. So if you have one of those spiraling staircases and it doesn't stop for 200 steps, that's one flight of stairs. If you have those zig zagging steps that you usually find in modern buildings, even tho there's only one floor between them, if there's a platform in between, that's 2 flight of stairs. So... There you go.