Floor, storey, level, l'?tage…

[Tamara]

Hi

Sorry for the sad background of/for the question.
I’ve just heard (on BBC World service) an interview with a German officer - concerning that recent shooting in the school.

He spoke English quite clearly (despite a few grammar tense mistakes), but for the "floor" he used the French word l'?tage. (In Russian we also use it as a standard word.)

I often feel that I need a more 'consistent picture' for storey/level/floor/l'?tage.

Well, my way to refer to building levels (in the UK) is the following:

1. For 'traditional' UK houses I use the traditional British way:
basement
ground floor
first floor (=upstairs)
attic /loft

2. For 'official' and/or 'tall' buildings I use 'storey' - exactly the same as if I do it in my language (as l'?tage).

So, a building that has three levels (passages, perhaps, with a row of windows) above curb, I name three-storey house, three-storeyed building.
When I enter such a building, I’m (normally) consider myself as being at (on?) the first storey( l'?tage).

But I wouldn’t use in storey/level phrases like I’m going at the third storey/level - when I’m inside the building.
Again, I 'subtract 1' and use floor.

I suppose that the German officer was just having a trouble with the correct English word (when giving the interview in English and for the BBC World), when he said ‘We’ve found that on the second l'?tage.’

What word would you use in his position?
_________________
It’s impossible to learn swimming without entering the water…

[Jamie (K)]

This gets more complicated.

In North America we count floors the same way the Russians do, so the ground floor and the first floor are the same thing.

I have checked the Oxford American Dictionary, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the word ?tage is not in either one of them, so we can throw that out in reference to floors of buildings.

In my environment, when we're talking about the levels inside anything from houses to skyscrapers, we talk about the floor. "The firefighters rescued the children from the third floor of the house." "Our offices are located on the 25th floor of the Renaissance Center." In both of those sentences, however, we could replace floor with storey, but we usually don't.

However, when we need an adjective to describe the height of a building, we use storey and not floor. So we would say "a five-storey building", but "a five-floor building" would sound odd to us.

When I hear storeys referred to as levels, I usually assume the building is a mult-storey parking garage or warehouse. It would be some building that has been constructed for some purpose other than human living or activity.

[Pond969]

Tamara (and Jamie). Etage is fairly commonly used in North America actually, although confined mostly to Canada and, even there, to the Provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. Your German Officer actually used the term improperly if he did in fact say 'the second l'etage'; he should have left out the (l') ... In New Brunswick, where I grew up, Government buildings have signs outside elevators (for example) identifying the 'Premiere Etage... Duxieme Etage and so on).

In English speaking Canada 'floor' and 'storey' are used as Jamie describes although there is no hard and fast rule about whether the first floor is the same as the ground floor or the one immediately above... the term is is used both ways. To add to the confusion, some buildings have a Mezzanine floor between the Ground floor and the first floor... so the first floor is actually the second (or third, depending how you count).

BTW ... I have seen 'level' used in multi-story shopping complexes.

[Yankee]

Hi Tamara

Jamie and Pond969 have given you some good input about the other side of the pond. What Jamie mentioned about the first floor and ground floor is absolutely true in the US. The system for naming floors in Germany is similar to what you mentioned for 'traditional UK houses'. However, the 'American system' was so ingrained in my head when I moved to Germany that I regularly misunderstood what floor people were talking about -- even though I understood all the German words just fine.

Amy

[Tamara]

Hi

Thanks a lot for your explanations!