I use 24h all the time when speaking, never got strange gazes for doing so. And I never remember which one is midday and which is midnight on the 12-hour time.

In Poland we use both interchangeably. U can use whatever suits you and everyone knows just fine.

What is the logic for distinguishing 12AM vs 12PM? Also, you have double of every element and need 2 more sillables each to distinguish.

It's confusing and inefficient.

It’s extremely common in Europe. I regularly get messages with “15h”, “22h”, etc, but spoken is a bit of a mixed bag, you can usually use 12 hour time and know if it’s AM/PM from context, but sometimes you need to be specific.

Though the weirdest thing I’ve had to learn in Germany about time is, near where I live it’s common to say “one/three quarters [hour]”, instead of “quarter past/to [hour]”, so 10:15 is “one quarter 11”, and 10:45 is “three quarters 11”. It makes a little more sense when you know that “half 11” mean “half to 11”, not “half past” like is typical in English.

That’s a Babylonian thing. They were obsessed with highly divisible numbers like, 12, 24 and 60. Basically the opposite of prime numbers, which are super annoying to divide. Babylonians wanted their numbers to as nice as possible when dividing. For example, 60 is particularly nice since it’s not absurdly large, but when dividing it, you have lots of options.

All of this was long before the decimal point and calculators were invented, so divisibility was a big thing back then. Nowadays though, having weird fractions like that is more inconvenient and annoying than nice. Thanks to the Babylonians, we have super messy time units now.

Thanks to the Romans, we also have super messy units for length, weight, volume and money. Yes, even money had convoluted fractions. That’s not a huge deal though, since basically nobody uses those any more.

If that was the case, we would now be talking about 48 h clocks vs. 24 h clocks.

18:40 pm on the 24h clock would equal 36:40 on the 48 h clock. You would still not know whether it's night or day just looking at the time.

I was answering about the Northern/Southern hemisphere logic of this... and realised that it depends if the sundial is vertical in a wall (facing South in the Northern hemisphere) or horizontal (facing the zenith/sky)... today you can easily find those wall sundials in many monumental buildings (at least these seem to me more common than the others) and the shadow is casted counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere, so not sure if the clockwise sense was locked by sundials... also in the Southern hemisphere logic flips completely.

*Being evolution of sundials located on the northern hemisphere.

So you're saying clockwise can also be called sundialwise?

Are you ok now?

Ein, zwei, drei, fire, funf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zein, elf, zwolf, dreizein…

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen…

Yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi, kuusi, seitsemän, kahdeksan, yhdeksän, kymmenen, yksitoista, kaksitoista, kolmetoista...

(though, notice that our words for "eight" and "nine" are derived from those for "two" and "one". We used base 8 before migrating to Europe and applying the local standard. Then it was "two left until the new ten and "one left until the new ten"
With base 8 you can use your fingers to count up to 24 because you can use your thumbs for marking the "tens". Or to 32, but that already takes a little bit of an effort because from my perspective your left thumb is on the right.)

But yeah, base 10 is the worst. 12 can be divided by 3 without problems. And base 8 allows counting far higher with just fingers.

Um akshually, Big Ben is the bell. The clock is just “The Great Clock of Westminster.” And the tower itself is called “Elizabeth Tower.”

(But everyone just calls the whole thing Big Ben.)