time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds


I often see English notation about time using the " and ' symbols. I have always mistaken about the two, and even their meaning.


I'm more used to "01:05:56", for example.


How do you represent the hour, minutes, and seconds using the apostrophe and quotes punctuations? Which is for the hour, which is for minutes, and which is for seconds?


Is it the common way to write duration of time elapsed? Do they have a special pronunciation?



Answer



It's not particularly common for expressions of time.


It's similar to degrees-minutes-seconds: instead of decimal degrees (38.897212°,-77.036519°) you write (38° 53′ 49.9632″, -77° 2′ 11.4678″). Both are derived from a sexagesimal counting system such as that devised in Ancient Babylon: the single prime represents the first sexagesimal division and the second the next, and so on. 17th-century astronomers used a third division of 1/60th of a second.


The advantage of using minute and second symbols for time is that it obviously expresses a duration rather than a time.


From the time 01:00:00 to the time 02:34:56 is a duration of 1 hour, 34 minutes and 56 seconds (1h 34′ 56″)


Prime markers start single and are multiplied for susbsequent appearances, so minutes use a single prime ′ and seconds use a double-prime ″. They are pronounced minutes and seconds respectively in the case of durations like this.


Note that a prime ′ is not a straight-apostrophe ' or a printer's apostrophe ’, although straight-apostrophes are a reasonable approximation and printer's apostrophes do occur as well.


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