My office is on the fourth floor of that gray six-story building.
Floors are named differently in France.
The English ground floor (first floor) is the rez-de-chaussée in France.
The English second floor is the first floor in France.
I believe the second floor is the deuxième étage in Quebec.
My office is on the fourth floor of that gray six-story building.
The naming of floors in France works like array indexes in the C programming language: 0, 1, 2 … n-1.
In Canada (including Quebec) and the USA the naming works like Fortran: 1, 2, 3 … n.
I’d say (and this is just a personal opinion) that its rather a matter of how we conceptualize the building. In french, we do start counting floors at 1 (excpet programmers, of course : D). The thing is that the base layer of a building is not an “étage” at all, but rather the “rez-de-chaussée”.
Whereas in english, the base layer is the ground floor, which is, well, a floor, so it makes sense that it is the first one, and that the one above it is the second
You mean in American, which is not the same thing. In most Australian buildings, and I believe this is the same in a lot of Commonwealth countries (though there may be exceptions), the ground floor is the ground floor, the one above that is the first floor and so on.
The floor plan of the Australia 108 building in Melbourne is an example.
Neither naming approach is right and neither is wrong, but there is a difference depending on location.
Ah, yeah, hadn’t thought about that. And actually, since ian says that in Quebec the ground floor is also floor 0, saying that my logic was “in french” isn’t quite accurate either. Oh well.
My main point, and maybe I should have kept my post at that, was that we don’t “start counting at 0”, but rather, that the “étage 0” is not an “étage” at all, and so, the first element of the “étages” array is indeed, as in (american?)english, the 1.