Proposal: loi lerfu tcita detri; the final word on the problem of dates and times?

There has been much debate about how the li-number in the x1 place of detri should be represented. As far as I can tell, there are two major camps:

One camp wants to use DD-MM-YYYY, separated by pi'e. Lojban for Beginners also promotes this usage. Its advantages are that people often refer to the date or the date and month without specifying the year; thus there is less need for empty pi'es. However, this has several disadvantages:

• Possible confusion for people who are used to MM-DD-YYYY systems.
• Specifying years will still need empty pi'es.

The other camp wants to follow the ISO 8601 system, also known as YYYY-MM-DD. This adopts the advantages that the ISO 8601 system has; namely, international applicability (less likely to confuse people who normally use either DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY), and having prescribed formats for many alternative countings like week-of-the-year and nth-day-of-the-year. However, it has one huge disadvantage: referring to the date or month while eliding the year requires use of empty pi'es. Also, pop quiz: if you want to refer to the 25th of this month under ISO 8601, how many pi'es should you use?

Did you say two? Because you would be wrong. The correct answer is three. The ISO 8601 specification says that a single dash is used to truncate the century. Two dashes would truncate the year, three for the year and month, leaving the day. (Seriously, it's right there on page 12 on the above linked document.) The problems are obvious; even if both the speaker and listener are aware of this pitfall, will they be able to count the pi'es accurately?

Additionally, the two systems directly clash, causing possible ambiguity, especially when talking about dates in the early years of the AD/CE system.

Hopefully no serious Lojbanist is suggesting that we use MM-DD-YYYY! zo'o

Anyway, because of all these problems, and after some discussion in the IRC chatrooms; I propose, loi lerfu tcita detri ("letter-tagged dates"), also known as the "NLJDCMS system": a unified Lojbanic system for dates and times.

Essentially, they look like this; 17 May 2015, 22:05:23 will be: (detri fa / de'i) li ny renopamu ly mu dy paze cy rere my mu sy reci or, to shorten the letters and numbers, li N 2015 L 5 D 17 C 22 M 5 S 23 (alternatively, me'o can be used instead.)

Essentially, each part of the date has a letter-tag associated with it. lo ve detri is considered to be a computer-program-like-system that could take all these weird mixed-base strings of letters and numbers and convert it to a point or duration in time. The letter-tags are:

• ny : year, for nanca
• ly : month, for lunra (the proper Lojban word is masti, but this metaphor is used to prevent a clash with mentu minute)
• jy : week, for jeftu (thus you can refer to "the second week of the year")
• dy : day, for djedi
• cy : hour, for cacra
• my : minute, for mentu
• sy : second, for snidu

Additionally, there are additional tags for less-used counting systems covered by the ISO 8601:

• nydy : day-of-the-year. For example de'i li ny renopamu nydy remuxa refers to 13 September, 2015, the 256th day of the year, Programmer's Day.
• jydy : day-of-the-week, starting on Monday; this is assumed for the dy place if the jy place is defined.
• vy : time zone, for ve tcika. This would be given in terms of hours after UTC (hours before UTC would be labeled by ni'u). So de'i li cy pavo my no vy ni'umu means "14:00, UTC-5"
• I assume that eliding the century won't be common, but it can be accomplished for translation purposes by using xo'e: de'i li ny xo'exo'epavo = "the year '14".

The advantage is that by having unique letter-tags for each part of the date, any element can be left out (or even reordered if you want, but let's not get crazy here zo'o). For example, to say "the year 2005", it is de'i li ny renonomu, or to say "the 25th of this month", it is de'i li dy remu. Additionally, the letter tags uniquely identify this system, thus it is unlikely to be confused with any previous usage of dates.

This system is also possibly extensible to other ve detri/calendar systems; however, someone familiar with those systems will have to figure out how this is to be accomplished.

Additional crazy idea: What if we also allowed periods-of-time? Like in ISO 8601, this would be accomplished by placing a special prefix right at the start of the detri. For example: de'i li py ny ci dy vo could mean "for three years and four days"... (note, not sure whether to use py here, but ditcu definitely can't be used). This does kinda stretch the meaning of detri though; perhaps another cmavo and/or brivla can be proposed.