9 ms·

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has

by retrac 4y ago

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1. Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week.

shakezula 4y ago
> Sunday = 1 Animals. Absolutely barbaric. Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
- stnikolauswagne 4y ago
  Time to start a movement to consider saturday the as the beginning of the week!
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Well by struct tm, Sunday is 0. And months start at 0. And the day of the month starts at 1!
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I remember years ago that Larry Wall said about Perl 5->6 upgrade: "We can fix some broken things." This was an item on his big list.
- rieTohgh6 4y ago
  I remember seeing API that accepted both 0 and 7 as Sunday.
  - N19PEDL2 4y ago
    crontab uses this approach, for example.
FastEatSlow 4y ago
I thought that that in Slavic languages Sunday would be the first day of the week, since the Polish for 'monday' means 'after sunday'. EDIT: got 'monday' and 'sunday' the wrong way round
- torstenvl 4y ago
  In Russian, Sunday is "Resurrection Day" and Monday is "The Thing concerning Not-Doing being in the Past-Perfective Tense" (po + ne+del + nik) It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    In Polish, Sunday is „niedziela”, and Monday is also „poniedziałek”, so it actually makes more sense than in Russian :) I suspect “niedziela” («неделя») was the original, proto-Slavic word for the day of the week, as some variations of it are used for I think all Slavic languages except Russian, who at some point decided to rename it to celebrate Resurrection.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Not-Doing can be a false alias: the week is nedelya and ponedelnik may thus mean "one going with the week*, i.e. starting it. Altough I'm not sure since the sibling proto-slavic explanation makes much sense. Fun fact: slavic languages split off in medieval times when the calendar and the week were already thorougly taken care of.
    - torstenvl 4y ago
      Only in Russian. In other Slavic languages it's mostly some form of ty + djen' (Polish tydzien Croatian tjedan Czech týden Belarusian тыдзень Ukrainian тиждень). But see Bulgarian (седмица seven-thing (fem.)). I suspect (without evidence) that, in Russian, it's referring to Sundays as a way of reckoning weeks. week:Sunday :: year:summer :: month::moon. Cf. "When I was but 10 summers old", "Many moons ago", etc. That would fit with the use of the archaic word for Sunday as well.
  - 4y ago
ysavir 4y ago
> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. I can confirm that in Hebrew, the name for Sunday translates into "First Day", Monday into "Second Day", etc. Except for Saturday, which is Shabat.
- latexr 4y ago
  In Portuguese, Monday through Friday translates to something like “Second Fair” through “Sixth Fair”¹. Saturday and Sunday aren’t numbered. ¹ “Fair” as in “a gathering of stalls and amusements for public entertainment”.
- jaza 4y ago
  Shabbat (apart from meaning "rest") is also generally accepted as deriving from the Hebrew word for "seven", which is "sheva". And Shabbat is sometimes referred to in Hebrew as "yom shvi-i" ("seventh day").
  - snotrockets 4y ago
    Citation needed. Klein Dictionary gives the etymology of שַׁבָּת as derived from שׁבת (to rest). I also found references suggesting the origin is with the Akkadian šapattum, the 15th of the month, but none related to שׁבע (which originates in Proto-Canaanite). היּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי (note the definite form!) is how Saturday is referred to in Genesis 2:2-3, without actually having the name שַׁבָּת. There's a some discussion about why שַׁבָּת isn't mentioned there as a name for the day, but regardless, your comment is the first time I read of the etymology of שַׁבָּת deriving from שׁבע.
    - xnzakg 4y ago
      Trying to read this on Android (in Materialistic) was fascinating, each line containing a Hebrew (?) word caused some of the words around it to switch places, but the words themselves are fine??
      - 4y ago
Cyph0n 4y ago
The Arabic/Islamic calendar starts at Sunday because the weekend is Friday and Saturday. In Islam, the weekly congregation (mass equivalent) takes place on Friday around noon.
- bradleysmith 4y ago
  Switched to a browser to comment exactly this. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, we started our work week on Saturday, with Wednesday being the last day of the work (school for me) week. It took me a long time to transition over to think about Saturday/Sunday as the days off. I still get random pangs of excitement on Wednesday thinking it’s the end of the week if my brain hasn’t warmed up. I believe this is still the case in the gulf states and I would assume other Islamic countries.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    You made me think of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia: All are Islamic majority in Southeast Asia. I Googled and look what I found: "Identify the first day of the week based on the locale" Ref: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000338932&type=1 https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000338932&type=... The entries for Indonesia don't make sense to me.
gorbypark 4y ago
As a English Canadian who works for a company that was bought by an American company and was force switched to Sunday as the first day of the week….what? Maybe we “officially” or legally have Sundays as the first day but my entire life has been Mondays first. Every calendar I’ve had has been that way as well. It still messes with my mind, even four years later, that at work Sunday is the first day of the week.
- skipants 4y ago
  I'm from Winnipeg originally and considered Sunday the first day of the week. Maybe it's regional or cultural?
  - paines 4y ago
    It doesn't truly matter or? It's not like you are going to work on sundays. You only realize it with calenders in e.g. Outlook, and long gone TV guides....
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      It's a little disorienting on booking sites (hotels etc) when the first day of the week isn't Monday. I once booked a train on the wrong day because the localisation changed part way through my search. (Fortunately I noticed.)
      - fknorangesite 4y ago
        Ah, I disagree: it's disorienting when the first day of the week is on Monday. Funny how that works, right?
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    What does it even mean to consider Sunday the first day of the week? What does it change?
    - 4y ago
fimdomeio 4y ago
Portuguese name weekdays by numbers ex Monday, Segunda-feira (Second Market), but I don't think anyone assumes Sunday as the first day. And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  That sounds quite sensible. From memory, our (en_GB) weekdays are named like this: Monday -> Moon day Tuesday -> Tiw's day (Norse) Wednesday -> Woden's day (Norse - Odin - chief god, one eye, two ravens) Thursday -> Thor's day (Norse - god with a massive hammer) Friday -> Freya's day (Norse, rode a chariot drawn by cats) Saturday -> Saturn's day (Roman, also: Saturnalia is the winter festival that eventually became Christmas) Sunday -> Sun day
  - el-salvador 4y ago
    > That sounds quite sensible. From memory, our (en_GB) weekdays are named like this: Spanish and English follow a similar day naming convention. But the god's name needs to be translated from Norse Mitology to Roman Mitology first [1] Lunes/Monday -> Moon/Luna Martes/Tuesday -> Tiw/Mars Miercoles/Wednesday -> Woden/Mercury Jueves/Thursday -> Thunraz/Jupiter Viernes/Friday -> Frig/Venus Sábado/Saturday -> Saturn/Saturno [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_graeca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_graeca
    - rodric 4y ago
      With the exception of Saturday. Tacitus associated the Hebrew sabbath («sábado») with Saturn, but the word for the day itself is not «saturno» as it would be if it were like English.
  - GolfPopper 4y ago
    I'd always thought (though I don't have a specific source I can recall), that the seven days of the week was drawn from the seven non-fixed celestial bodies visible ot the naked eye: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The planets were frequently associated with and named after deities, so the days of the week also have the names of deities.
School-Cotton 4y ago
> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada Interesting. How does software (e.g. Google Calendar) display weeks when in en_CA localization?
- murderfs 4y ago
  Most software I can think of lets you configure it independent of the locale.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
stuartd 4y ago
> .. considers Sunday to be the first day of the week How can the first day of the week happen in the middle of the weekend!?!
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  The same way all the other illogical things happened: random cultural legacy. Why would you expect the week start day to be any different?
- count 4y ago
  Both ends of the week are the weekend. One is the starting weekend, and the other the ending weekend.
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    Right, I (in the US) always figured "end" in the word "weekend" was akin to the two ends of a line segment, the two ends of a bar, etc. To instead think of "end" in the word "weekend" as the opposite of "start" is to use a completely different definition of the word "end". I wonder if "weekend" therefore has two definitions, given the split dependency.
    - glandium 4y ago
      It feels to me that for "end" to be used as the two ends of the week, it would be weekends (plural), not weekend (singular).
  - NorwegianDude 4y ago
    Considering that the word is from the British and the fact that the week ends with Sunday there, that can't be it. It would also be weekends, not weekend if there was multiple ends. The upcoming weekends doesn't mean Saturday and Sunday in the US... It occurs over a time period of at least one whole week into the future...right?
- drdeca 4y ago
  Because the week has two endpoints: the initial day of the week and the final day of the week.
chrisweekly 4y ago
"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners and calendar software should treat weeks as starting on Monday, right?" "..."
- chungy 4y ago
  6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that. My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community agrees on a day and goes along with it. So for me, Sunday it is. (It also doesn't matter how a calendar is printed; it could start on Wednesday for all I care. It'd be weird, but it wouldn't change anything.)
  - Terretta 4y ago
    The day of the sun, or the Lord's day, is not the 7th day sabbath, it was declared by the Catholic Church to supersede the Sabbath and celebrate the resurrection instead. In saying “the Sabbath . . . has been replaced by Sunday” (CCC 2190), the Church does not dismiss the significance of the Sabbath. The Catechism reminds us, “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the Sabbath which it follows chronologically every week” (CCC 2175). https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-lords-day-replaced-the-sabbath https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-lords-da... As for which day is the 7th, you can check with descendants of the good book's authors, still around, and still keeping count. The Jewish faith hasn't lost track.
    - chungy 4y ago
      Thanks, that's good info :) I definitely have new things to study and ponder about. I'm of the Latter-day Saints tradition and we basically use Lord's Day and Sabbath interchangeably, though I'm speaking anecdotally and from casual use. I may very well be using it incorrectly!
xani_ 4y ago
> Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week. The cron way, where both 0 and 7 means sunday
nodja 4y ago
> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1. For portuguese the name being number based has nothing to do with when the week starts, portugal is historically a very christian country and always had the week end on sundays, "and on the seventh day he rested", in both casual/formal speech and formally with calendars and such, saturday and sunday are always put at the end. The names being numerical was because that's how the names were named during Holy Week (the week that ends with easter sunday), christians were supposed to rest and not work during that week, so sunday was the first rest day, monday the second rest day, etc. which is what the names mean, some people today think it means fair as in state fair/market, e.g. monday is "segunda-feira" = "second fair", but it actually means something closer to holiday, the modern portuguese word being férias. The reason it took over was basically because the church said so, the old names were still based on old gods and the new nomenclature was adopted for all weeks instead of being Holy Week exclusive. I guess if the aliens landed in portugal that would be another thing to add to the thread :)
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  All Christian denominations agree with the Jewish ones: God rested on the seventh day - The Sabbath, or Saturday. Jesus was then resurrected on the day after the Sabbath, the first day of the Jewish week, which became the Lord's Day in many European languages (Domenica, Domingo, Duminică etc). It was quickly understood as a non-working day, a day of religious celebration, but it was still the first day of the week. Now, since Jesus and his resurrection are much more important in Christianity than the creation of the world, the Sabbath began losing its importance, and so renumbering the week started making sense, but was a contentious religious and political issue for a long time. Of course, having two rest days, and one of them being based on Jewish customs in a quite anti-semitic medieval Europe, played a part as well in wanting to change things. I'm relatively sure that the Portuguese week day names are based on the original Jewish week.
magnio 4y ago
> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. Vietnamese only numbers the days of the week from Monday to Saturday, with Monday = 2 and Saturday = 7. Sunday has its own name that isn't a number and is always put at the end of the week.
bawolff 4y ago
> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada As an english canadian (alberta), i have never in my life heard of people considering sunday the first day of the week. Edit: appearently people are talking what is printed on calendar. I consider that to be a separate thing. If you asked me to list the days of the week in order i would start on monday, which is a totally separate question from the layout of a printed calendar.
- retrac 4y ago
  > which is a totally separate question from the layout of a printed calendar I have no strong preference on Monday/Sunday, and I don't think either is inherently more logical than the other. However, it would be illogical, whether Sunday or Monday first, to have the 7th and last day of the week, laid out as the first column on the calendar.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    I like to have my two weekend days next to each other since they are a fairly discrete chunk of time in my mind and planning.
- kelnos 4y ago
  How would the colloquial understanding of the first day of the week get divorced from what's printed on calendars, though? I feel like one should inform the other, no? Out of curiosity, if you have a calendar app on your computer, does it start with Sunday or Monday?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Majority of calendars in Japan are starts from Sunday but IMO now people think week starts from Monday. It's relevant to whether people work (or went to school) on Saturday or not (so two consecutive holidays). Some research shows that old ages (who worked on Saturday) tend to think it starts from Sunday. Calendars tend to follow traditions, and the difference isn't much matter. Also computer apps are tend to follow the US culture since US dominates the industry.
kenneth 4y ago
In Chinese the weekdays are also numbered and indexed to Monday: Monday = 星期一 xingqi yi (1), Tuedsay = xingqi er (2), all the way down.
themaninthedark 4y ago
Japanese calendars start the week with Sunday as well.

by retrac 4y ago

shakezula 4y ago

> Sunday = 1 Animals. Absolutely barbaric. Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s

stnikolauswagne 4y ago
Time to start a movement to consider saturday the as the beginning of the week!
Dylan16807 4y ago
Well by struct tm, Sunday is 0. And months start at 0. And the day of the month starts at 1!
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I remember years ago that Larry Wall said about Perl 5->6 upgrade: "We can fix some broken things." This was an item on his big list.
rieTohgh6 4y ago
I remember seeing API that accepted both 0 and 7 as Sunday.
- N19PEDL2 4y ago
  crontab uses this approach, for example.

FastEatSlow 4y ago

I thought that that in Slavic languages Sunday would be the first day of the week, since the Polish for 'monday' means 'after sunday'. EDIT: got 'monday' and 'sunday' the wrong way round

torstenvl 4y ago
In Russian, Sunday is "Resurrection Day" and Monday is "The Thing concerning Not-Doing being in the Past-Perfective Tense" (po + ne+del + nik) It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  In Polish, Sunday is „niedziela”, and Monday is also „poniedziałek”, so it actually makes more sense than in Russian :) I suspect “niedziela” («неделя») was the original, proto-Slavic word for the day of the week, as some variations of it are used for I think all Slavic languages except Russian, who at some point decided to rename it to celebrate Resurrection.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Not-Doing can be a false alias: the week is nedelya and ponedelnik may thus mean "one going with the week*, i.e. starting it. Altough I'm not sure since the sibling proto-slavic explanation makes much sense. Fun fact: slavic languages split off in medieval times when the calendar and the week were already thorougly taken care of.
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    Only in Russian. In other Slavic languages it's mostly some form of ty + djen' (Polish tydzien Croatian tjedan Czech týden Belarusian тыдзень Ukrainian тиждень). But see Bulgarian (седмица seven-thing (fem.)). I suspect (without evidence) that, in Russian, it's referring to Sundays as a way of reckoning weeks. week:Sunday :: year:summer :: month::moon. Cf. "When I was but 10 summers old", "Many moons ago", etc. That would fit with the use of the archaic word for Sunday as well.
- 4y ago

ysavir 4y ago

> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. I can confirm that in Hebrew, the name for Sunday translates into "First Day", Monday into "Second Day", etc. Except for Saturday, which is Shabat.

latexr 4y ago
In Portuguese, Monday through Friday translates to something like “Second Fair” through “Sixth Fair”¹. Saturday and Sunday aren’t numbered. ¹ “Fair” as in “a gathering of stalls and amusements for public entertainment”.
jaza 4y ago
Shabbat (apart from meaning "rest") is also generally accepted as deriving from the Hebrew word for "seven", which is "sheva". And Shabbat is sometimes referred to in Hebrew as "yom shvi-i" ("seventh day").
- snotrockets 4y ago
  Citation needed. Klein Dictionary gives the etymology of שַׁבָּת as derived from שׁבת (to rest). I also found references suggesting the origin is with the Akkadian šapattum, the 15th of the month, but none related to שׁבע (which originates in Proto-Canaanite). היּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי (note the definite form!) is how Saturday is referred to in Genesis 2:2-3, without actually having the name שַׁבָּת. There's a some discussion about why שַׁבָּת isn't mentioned there as a name for the day, but regardless, your comment is the first time I read of the etymology of שַׁבָּת deriving from שׁבע.
  - xnzakg 4y ago
    Trying to read this on Android (in Materialistic) was fascinating, each line containing a Hebrew (?) word caused some of the words around it to switch places, but the words themselves are fine??
    - 4y ago

Cyph0n 4y ago

The Arabic/Islamic calendar starts at Sunday because the weekend is Friday and Saturday. In Islam, the weekly congregation (mass equivalent) takes place on Friday around noon.

bradleysmith 4y ago
Switched to a browser to comment exactly this. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, we started our work week on Saturday, with Wednesday being the last day of the work (school for me) week. It took me a long time to transition over to think about Saturday/Sunday as the days off. I still get random pangs of excitement on Wednesday thinking it’s the end of the week if my brain hasn’t warmed up. I believe this is still the case in the gulf states and I would assume other Islamic countries.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  You made me think of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia: All are Islamic majority in Southeast Asia. I Googled and look what I found: "Identify the first day of the week based on the locale" Ref: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000338932&type=1 https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000338932&type=... The entries for Indonesia don't make sense to me.

gorbypark 4y ago

As a English Canadian who works for a company that was bought by an American company and was force switched to Sunday as the first day of the week….what? Maybe we “officially” or legally have Sundays as the first day but my entire life has been Mondays first. Every calendar I’ve had has been that way as well. It still messes with my mind, even four years later, that at work Sunday is the first day of the week.

skipants 4y ago
I'm from Winnipeg originally and considered Sunday the first day of the week. Maybe it's regional or cultural?
- paines 4y ago
  It doesn't truly matter or? It's not like you are going to work on sundays. You only realize it with calenders in e.g. Outlook, and long gone TV guides....
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    It's a little disorienting on booking sites (hotels etc) when the first day of the week isn't Monday. I once booked a train on the wrong day because the localisation changed part way through my search. (Fortunately I noticed.)
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      Ah, I disagree: it's disorienting when the first day of the week is on Monday. Funny how that works, right?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  What does it even mean to consider Sunday the first day of the week? What does it change?
  - 4y ago

fimdomeio 4y ago

Portuguese name weekdays by numbers ex Monday, Segunda-feira (Second Market), but I don't think anyone assumes Sunday as the first day. And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.

gerdesj 4y ago
That sounds quite sensible. From memory, our (en_GB) weekdays are named like this: Monday -> Moon day Tuesday -> Tiw's day (Norse) Wednesday -> Woden's day (Norse - Odin - chief god, one eye, two ravens) Thursday -> Thor's day (Norse - god with a massive hammer) Friday -> Freya's day (Norse, rode a chariot drawn by cats) Saturday -> Saturn's day (Roman, also: Saturnalia is the winter festival that eventually became Christmas) Sunday -> Sun day
- el-salvador 4y ago
  > That sounds quite sensible. From memory, our (en_GB) weekdays are named like this: Spanish and English follow a similar day naming convention. But the god's name needs to be translated from Norse Mitology to Roman Mitology first [1] Lunes/Monday -> Moon/Luna Martes/Tuesday -> Tiw/Mars Miercoles/Wednesday -> Woden/Mercury Jueves/Thursday -> Thunraz/Jupiter Viernes/Friday -> Frig/Venus Sábado/Saturday -> Saturn/Saturno [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_graeca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_graeca
  - rodric 4y ago
    With the exception of Saturday. Tacitus associated the Hebrew sabbath («sábado») with Saturn, but the word for the day itself is not «saturno» as it would be if it were like English.
- GolfPopper 4y ago
  I'd always thought (though I don't have a specific source I can recall), that the seven days of the week was drawn from the seven non-fixed celestial bodies visible ot the naked eye: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The planets were frequently associated with and named after deities, so the days of the week also have the names of deities.

School-Cotton 4y ago

> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada Interesting. How does software (e.g. Google Calendar) display weeks when in en_CA localization?

murderfs 4y ago
Most software I can think of lets you configure it independent of the locale.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

stuartd 4y ago

> .. considers Sunday to be the first day of the week How can the first day of the week happen in the middle of the weekend!?!

School-Cotton 4y ago
The same way all the other illogical things happened: random cultural legacy. Why would you expect the week start day to be any different?
count 4y ago
Both ends of the week are the weekend. One is the starting weekend, and the other the ending weekend.
- hunter2_ 4y ago
  Right, I (in the US) always figured "end" in the word "weekend" was akin to the two ends of a line segment, the two ends of a bar, etc. To instead think of "end" in the word "weekend" as the opposite of "start" is to use a completely different definition of the word "end". I wonder if "weekend" therefore has two definitions, given the split dependency.
  - glandium 4y ago
    It feels to me that for "end" to be used as the two ends of the week, it would be weekends (plural), not weekend (singular).
- NorwegianDude 4y ago
  Considering that the word is from the British and the fact that the week ends with Sunday there, that can't be it. It would also be weekends, not weekend if there was multiple ends. The upcoming weekends doesn't mean Saturday and Sunday in the US... It occurs over a time period of at least one whole week into the future...right?
drdeca 4y ago
Because the week has two endpoints: the initial day of the week and the final day of the week.

chrisweekly 4y ago

"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners and calendar software should treat weeks as starting on Monday, right?" "..."

chungy 4y ago
6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that. My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community agrees on a day and goes along with it. So for me, Sunday it is. (It also doesn't matter how a calendar is printed; it could start on Wednesday for all I care. It'd be weird, but it wouldn't change anything.)
- Terretta 4y ago
  The day of the sun, or the Lord's day, is not the 7th day sabbath, it was declared by the Catholic Church to supersede the Sabbath and celebrate the resurrection instead. In saying “the Sabbath . . . has been replaced by Sunday” (CCC 2190), the Church does not dismiss the significance of the Sabbath. The Catechism reminds us, “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the Sabbath which it follows chronologically every week” (CCC 2175). https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-lords-day-replaced-the-sabbath https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-lords-da... As for which day is the 7th, you can check with descendants of the good book's authors, still around, and still keeping count. The Jewish faith hasn't lost track.
  - chungy 4y ago
    Thanks, that's good info :) I definitely have new things to study and ponder about. I'm of the Latter-day Saints tradition and we basically use Lord's Day and Sabbath interchangeably, though I'm speaking anecdotally and from casual use. I may very well be using it incorrectly!

xani_ 4y ago

> Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week. The cron way, where both 0 and 7 means sunday

nodja 4y ago

> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1. For portuguese the name being number based has nothing to do with when the week starts, portugal is historically a very christian country and always had the week end on sundays, "and on the seventh day he rested", in both casual/formal speech and formally with calendars and such, saturday and sunday are always put at the end. The names being numerical was because that's how the names were named during Holy Week (the week that ends with easter sunday), christians were supposed to rest and not work during that week, so sunday was the first rest day, monday the second rest day, etc. which is what the names mean, some people today think it means fair as in state fair/market, e.g. monday is "segunda-feira" = "second fair", but it actually means something closer to holiday, the modern portuguese word being férias. The reason it took over was basically because the church said so, the old names were still based on old gods and the new nomenclature was adopted for all weeks instead of being Holy Week exclusive. I guess if the aliens landed in portugal that would be another thing to add to the thread :)

tsimionescu 4y ago
All Christian denominations agree with the Jewish ones: God rested on the seventh day - The Sabbath, or Saturday. Jesus was then resurrected on the day after the Sabbath, the first day of the Jewish week, which became the Lord's Day in many European languages (Domenica, Domingo, Duminică etc). It was quickly understood as a non-working day, a day of religious celebration, but it was still the first day of the week. Now, since Jesus and his resurrection are much more important in Christianity than the creation of the world, the Sabbath began losing its importance, and so renumbering the week started making sense, but was a contentious religious and political issue for a long time. Of course, having two rest days, and one of them being based on Jewish customs in a quite anti-semitic medieval Europe, played a part as well in wanting to change things. I'm relatively sure that the Portuguese week day names are based on the original Jewish week.

magnio 4y ago

> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. Vietnamese only numbers the days of the week from Monday to Saturday, with Monday = 2 and Saturday = 7. Sunday has its own name that isn't a number and is always put at the end of the week.

bawolff 4y ago

> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada As an english canadian (alberta), i have never in my life heard of people considering sunday the first day of the week. Edit: appearently people are talking what is printed on calendar. I consider that to be a separate thing. If you asked me to list the days of the week in order i would start on monday, which is a totally separate question from the layout of a printed calendar.

retrac 4y ago
> which is a totally separate question from the layout of a printed calendar I have no strong preference on Monday/Sunday, and I don't think either is inherently more logical than the other. However, it would be illogical, whether Sunday or Monday first, to have the 7th and last day of the week, laid out as the first column on the calendar.
- kevincox 4y ago
  I like to have my two weekend days next to each other since they are a fairly discrete chunk of time in my mind and planning.
kelnos 4y ago
How would the colloquial understanding of the first day of the week get divorced from what's printed on calendars, though? I feel like one should inform the other, no? Out of curiosity, if you have a calendar app on your computer, does it start with Sunday or Monday?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fomine3 4y ago
  Majority of calendars in Japan are starts from Sunday but IMO now people think week starts from Monday. It's relevant to whether people work (or went to school) on Saturday or not (so two consecutive holidays). Some research shows that old ages (who worked on Saturday) tend to think it starts from Sunday. Calendars tend to follow traditions, and the difference isn't much matter. Also computer apps are tend to follow the US culture since US dominates the industry.

kenneth 4y ago

In Chinese the weekdays are also numbered and indexed to Monday: Monday = 星期一 xingqi yi (1), Tuedsay = xingqi er (2), all the way down.

themaninthedark 4y ago

Japanese calendars start the week with Sunday as well.