/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.
I don't honestly care much what people consider the beginning of the week, I try to avoid ambiguity in planning as much as I can anyways for other reasons (this Sunday vs next Sunday for eg.) but I have been tripped up by an unexpected Monday-first calendar in a webapp.
If someone says "let's meet the 3rd week of April" and you say "ok, let's do Sunday", do you really mean the Sunday in the 4th calendar row?
I once booked a train on the wrong day because the localisation changed part way through my search. (Fortunately I noticed.)
Funny how that works, right?
I think its airbnb that still shows me calendar starting form Sunday. Not cool when you are looking at all those other sites for flight bookings or car rentals, all of them starting from Monday since they respect your locale, and then you book accommodation by muscle memory (since you re-did the searches numerous times as planning decisions about vacation took place), starting at given field for day of the week, only realizing that its moved by 1 day earlier (or later, not sure now). Good if you find out quickly, bad if on the 'arrival' day and your family have nowhere to sleep and its already dark.
I know that this won't ever be resolved mainly due to big egos of those involved, in same way that there will always be those ridiculous feet and inches and miles and absurd conversions between those, on top of fahrenheit madness. Tells something about maturity of mankind...
If you’re in Ontario, you’ll rarely see a paper calendar that isn’t SMTWTFS
Never heard anywhere in canada that don’t have their calendar start on Sunday but I’d be curious to find out otherwise.
Perhaps though that is due to the increasingly globalized world and stationery stores desire to have a lot of varied product from great product makers in Japan, USA and further afield.
I grew up aware that some people considered Sunday the start and others Monday, but didn't seem like there were any real firm rules about it where it mattered. I feel like I saw both being used. I always preferred using Monday as the start of the week.
Edit: Had a quick look at the Vancouver recycling calendar they sent me in the mail: Sunday first.
Yeah, Staples or a high end paper craft store will have both.
But if you go into one of those popup calendar stores, all the calendars will be SMTWTFS.
"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?"
"..."
If your church preaches differently, they should read their Bible more carefully.
Although they’re fairly distinct traditions, in my experience each places great importance on religious liberty and separation of church and state, because historically all three groups have faced governmental persecution from blue laws. SDAs go so far as to believe Revelation’s mark of the Beast refers to a blue law to come in the future.
Messianics also have been known to face religious persecution in Israel. To the extent Christianity is viewed with mistrust by Judaism due to Christendom’s history of persecuting Jews, Messianic Judaism is further seen as an attempt by Christians to co‐opt or corrupt Jewish practices.
(Another fun fact: Seventh‐day Adventists hyphenate their name, but Seventh Day Baptists don’t.)
It's called a bookEND only if it's to the right of the row of books. If it's to the left (for books in an RTL language), we call it a bookSTART
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.)
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-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.
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!
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.
Ref: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000338932&type=...
The entries for Indonesia don't make sense to me.
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.
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.
> Other related words are ... to sheva (שֶׁבַע) meaning seven, as Shabbat is the seventh day of the week ...
¹ “Fair” as in “a gathering of stalls and amusements for public entertainment”.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, if you have a calendar app on your computer, does it start with Sunday or Monday?
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.
And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.
That is not up to assumptions, but to conventions and arbitrariness. You find both conventions among Portuguese speakers, but mostly domingo/Sunday as the first day of the week.
A good way to check this is to websearch pictures for "calendário em português", and look for the first column of the calendar. Most will have D/Dom (domingo/Sunday); however a large minority will have S/Seg (segunda-feira/Monday) instead.
>And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.
It's mostly a fossilised meaning.
Latin "feriae" originally meant holidays, holy days, vacations, and the likes; that's why the clergy¹ chose "feria" for the weekdays, as you'd be praising their god instead of the Pagan gods². However, already in Late Latin, this backformation also meant "fair"³. In Portuguese that second meaning eventually evolved to "street market", likely due to influence of the names of the days of the week - you don't work in domingo/Sunday or sábado/Saturday, but you gotta work and sell stuff in the "dias de feira" (feira days).
1. This clergy intervention was done in Latin. This is visible for the name of Tuesday being terça-feira ← tertia feria instead of *terceira feira (third holy day).
2. The traditional names for Monday to Friday were lues, martes, mércores, joves, vernes. Ecclesiastical interference got rid of the names for Sunday and Saturday early on, but if Portuguese inherited the Roman names they'd be something like "soes" and "sadurnes" respectively.
3. In fact that's where English got the word "fair" from. At least when it comes to those fancy markets/exhibitions/etc.; not to be confused with the homophone "fair" for just, beautiful, etc., as this one is native and unrelated.
Monday = Segunda (second) = понедельник (start of the week)
Tuesday = Terça (third) = вторник (second)
Wednesday = Quarta (fourth) = среда (middle)
Thursday = Quinta (fifth) = Четверг (fourth)
Friday = Sexta (sixth) = пятница (fifth)
So I guess Russians have no doubt as to when the week starts.
In Russian the word for week is "nedelya", so "ponedelnik" does seem to naturally tie into that. But the word for Sunday in Russian is "voskresenie" (literally means resurrection). Notice this! Every religious word used in non-religious context is suspicious!
If we examine Bulgarian, the week is called "sedmica" (sedm == seven). And Sunday is called "nedelya" (I perceive it as "ne delya" === "no work").
Thus, in Bulgarian the word ponedelnik becomes like "the day after Sunday", rather than "the day starting every week".
Now going back to the Sunday resurrection theme, it's obviously of religious origins, so I dare assume that it may have replaced something that was already there (like nedelya). And then I imagine the people still wanted to keep the word around, so they started using it to mean "week" instead of "Sunday".
If so, then it would make sense that ponedelnik just means "post Sunday".
[The above is just a pet theory I haven't spent any time on, so I'm not guaranteeing its legitimacy]
Matthew 28:1 (NIV): “After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.”
Mark 16:1–2 (NIV): “When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb…”
Luke 24:1 (NIV): “On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.”
John 20:1 (NIV): “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb…”
I believe that they resurrected the practice of considering Sunday as the first day of the week, based on the Old Testament tradition. Just like New Earth Creationism is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon driven by a renewed interest in literal interpretations of the Bible, that had long since been superseded in Catholic scholarship.
There are also several patristic writings that conceptualise Sunday as the eighth day of creation, i.e. the resurrection perfecting and completing creation (this also suggests that literal seven day creation wasn’t taken that… er… literally back in the day).
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
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
You can get any calendar from a Portuguese speaking country to see they do.
Animals. Absolutely barbaric.
Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
The cron way, where both 0 and 7 means sunday
How can the first day of the week happen in the middle of the weekend!?!
<stack of bricks> <book> <book> <book> <book> <book> <stack of bricks>
or do you do:
<book> <book> <book> <book> <book> <stack of bricks> <stack of bricks>
"How was your weekend?"
Or do you ask:
"How were your weekends?"
- https://www.iflscience.com/stressed-out-snake-eats-itself-24...
One is the starting weekend, and the other the ending weekend.
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.
Why would you expect the week start day to be any different?
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 :)
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.
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.
EDIT: got 'monday' and 'sunday' the wrong way round
It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"
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.
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.
Interesting. How does software (e.g. Google Calendar) display weeks when in en_CA localization?
It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format, but in everyday use and in cases where context makes it clear what you mean, people use the 12h format.
And for what its worth, the name for Wednesday, keskiviiko, means midweek.
We might say beers at 5, but I haven’t seen “5.00p” rather than 1700 in written form for decades outside of the US
Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts.
But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places?
I'm from this planet, and even I am confused with all of us, but especially with Americans.
I believe, but I may be wrong, that the inconsistency arises from Sunday being the Christian sabbath. That “starts” the week, but it’s a traditional day off for religious observance. And this tradition goes back well before the 40 hour work week, and the common Monday–Friday work week. Which is to say that “weekend” didn’t originally have connotations about which days were work days, they were typically all work days except for the Christian sabbath. Which as a retcon makes the present colloquial usage even odder, even if it’s (maybe?) more consistent with how other countries/cultures use it.
I disagree. I can’t remember having ever seen calendars display any day other than Sunday as the first of the week, except in the case of computer software made by non-Americans who didn’t think to localize it.
But even with people I don't put in that category, I'd hesitate to assume +13 days if they said "next Sunday" on Monday. More likely they mean +6 when it's so far out...
For example, when driving, to her "turn at the next corner" means "the corner after the next", while to me it means "the corner the car is about to cross". What I call "the next corner" to her is "this corner".
Same with days, of course.
It drives me crazy!
Interesting to see so many people here who do interpret it that way.
“Next week” on a Sunday is ambiguous because some people consider the new week to have started while others consider it to start the next day.
Likewise, on a Friday afternoon most people (in my experience) don't say "Hey we're having a cook out next Sunday, want to come?" and mean the Sunday in exactly two days. Again, because the phrase "this Sunday" is available and more precise.
In fact, I think in my experience "next X" almost always implies a full 7 days between now and the X. If my boss on Monday says "we need this in production next Friday" I don't normally take that to mean "we need this in production in the next 4 days.
It's the case of saying "next Tuesday" on a Thursday, and meaning that no Tuesdays will pass before the date in question, versus saying "next Thursday" on a Tuesday, where a Thursday will happen before the date.
That's because on Thursday, "this Tuesday" has already happened. But sometimes people will be thinking of "Tuesday after next" when they say "next Tuesday" on a Thursday, because they mean "the Tuesday after the coming Tuesday" and not "the Tuesday of next week".
Since “next Tuesday” also puts the sentence context into the future, the ambiguity exists around whether it means “Tuesday in 5 days” or “Tuesday in 12 days”
If no such ambiguity existed, we wouldn’t need common phrases like “this coming Tuesday” which clarifies the speaker is talking about the “next Tuesday with no other Tuesday’s in between”
Amusingly I don’t think there’s much ambiguity around “the Tuesday after next” as a phrase even though it should be equally ambiguous, but I’ve never heard that phrase to mean “3 Tuesdays from now”
But when communicating with other people, it matters what they understand. And I've come across enough people who don't use "next Monday" like that to understand the word "next" means trouble.
If I say "next Wednesday" on Thursday, I mean the Wednesday of next week, not "this Wednesday" which was yesterday.
"Next Weekday" of a weekday that's yet to happen, means one week after that day within this week.
"Next Weekday" of a weekday that already happened, means the very next instance of that day in the calendar, "This Weekday" refers to the past.
"Hey, this Tuesday was your presentation right? How did it go?"
"We rescheduled for next Monday actually". <- this is obviously the Monday after the coming weekend.
Edit: also on a Friday, you can say next week and mean Monday (3 days later)
I was always under the impression that Americans basically agreed on that the week started on Monday, that the weekend ended with Sunday and that next week meant after Sunday. I thought Sunday as the first day in American calendars was a "yeah, it's stupid we do it like that, but I guess that is how it used to be back in the days" kind of thing.
The week starts on Sunday. The weekend ends on Sunday. It only makes sense if you consider two adjoining endpoints of previous weeks to be one "weekend", which I've never known anyone not to do without thinking about it.
Someone talking at work might mean something different, but I don't usually hear "next week" to mean Monday-Sunday in general conversation and we'd probably clarify for Sunday anyway.
If someone says "The week of the 15th" and Sunday is the 15th, they mean the seven days from 15-21 not the seven days of 9-15.
"Next week, maybe Sunday" means the next calendar Sunday as in Sunday-Saturday, not the Sunday after that as in Monday-Sunday.
Anyone who says otherwise is selling calendars with a Monday start of the week. :)
You are thinking of how Jesus is said to resurrect on the first day of the week (I.e., Sunday) and later that becomes the Sabbath day for (most) Christians.
I've found it hard to search for details of this aspect of labor history because results are almost entirely about the movement for, and details of, what came after: the 8 hour workday. But my understanding is still that Sunday was historically the conventional rest day in the US (at least for workers who could enjoy a rest day at all), regardless of the history of the traditional Jewish/pre-Christian/Restorationist sabbath observed on Saturday. The best source I’ve found so far[1] doesn’t explicitly say so, but does strongly suggest that Saturday came later as a recognized day off because the competing “weekend” equivalent spanned Sunday–Monday (I’m also fascinated to have learned about Saint Monday). I’m sure there are other sources to find, but I’m going to leave it here to enjoy the remainder of my rest day/weekend/first day of the week.
1: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phe...
Separately, we call Saturday and Sunday “the weekend”. Yes, these two facts are logically inconsistent, but we live with it and I have never observed it causing any difficulty in practice.
The concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.
Monday through Friday is the workweek.
In SMWTTFS the Saturday and Sunday are at the ends as in limits of the week, and furthermore it makes sense for there to be two "weekend" days like there are two bookends. In MWTTFSS Sunday is the only actual end of the week with Saturday being included just because(?) and Monday being "weekbegin", which isn't really a word in English.
So based on this SMWTTFS seems more logical and sensible at least in English.
I mean I get it that Sunday being the first day of the week is a leftover from religious past but this does not make it any more logical when applied to the workweek/weekend cadence. Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?
What benefit would we get from doing so? Metric I can understand the benefits of, though I also see why Americans are resistant implementing such a disruptive change in daily life. But shifting our definition of the week by one day provides no benefit that I can see, nor does keeping it the way it is cause any harm. The primary argument I’ve seen in these threads is “because the word ‘weekend’ doesn’t make sense,” but that’s not very convincing to me since I and every other American I know find the phrasing perfectly natural—and if we want to make the English vocabulary perfectly ‘logical’ and ‘consistent,’ there are far more disturbing malapropisms in common use to tackle first.
Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian and sabbath itself can be traced back to the Babylonian loan word for fifteen..mistaken as seven. šabattu is the 15th day of the month, the time of the full moon Vs “sebūtu“ was the 7th day of the lunar quarter.
The Akkadians had no concept of ‘week’. They simply followed the moon. Starting with the new moon, first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. Their festivals were based on the 1, 7 etc and 15 day with the 15th day being observed as the bright full moon.
It must have been from the Babylonians that the Hebrews adopted the 7 day week because they had seen them celebrate the 7th day, “sebūtu“. Altho they probably chose the word for the 15th day/full moon of Babylonian šabattu as it’s closer to Hebrew ‘sabbot’ and their word for ‘rest’. Post exile Hebrews took this to create the Hebrew calender and created sabbot as the 7th day of rest.
The Babylonians celebrated 1, 7, 21 and 28th day after new moon as the beginning of each quarter. Hebrews simply took each quarter to be a slice of time instead of differentiating between the four quarters between two new moons.
The days in Hebrew are simply numbered, First day, Second day etc. except for Shabbat
"A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history without reference to the phases of the moon was first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest."
In Judaism the week starts from Sunday, so you could argue that it's not completely illogical for it to be the case in the US.
Changing the rest day of the week to Sunday was a change made in Christianity by the Council of Laodicea:
"Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ".
Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring.
Asimov had an excellent chapter on calendar in his divulgative book The Universe, explaining why it's not so easy to design a regular "logical" calendar.
Nobody needs to know all those annoying details, but once you know, the joke doesn't work so well, at least it didn't for me.
Also I believe that the Moon deserves some respect. It makes nights less scary, inspires whimsical humans and provided a convenient way to measure middle-length periods of time when a precise calendar hadn't been developed... many moons ago.
I'm also making a comical absurdity just fyi. Do people like this exist? I don't know
But in a way that doesn't work right.
> Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring.
Yes? That's a mess and that's basically what the tweets said. They didn't mention the emperors but that makes it even messier. I'm not sure what you're arguing there. There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.
It works great for the purpose that it was used: counting groups of days when regular humans didn't have the luxury of more precise calendars.
The part that doesn't "work right" is that the different natural cycles used to measure time are not multiples of others, so adjustements are always needed. That's why calendar is complex, it was fixed repeatedly until it doesn't drift.
Weeks and months are not kept because we don't know better, but because they're useful units for social reasons.
There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.
That's a different part of the comment, addressing the hint that there's a religious reason for the calendar.
There are several eras used by different countries, and the common western calendar has several layers: weekdays seem to be of Sumerian origin, months at least in Latin and other European languages come from Roma and the AD year counting is "Christian" and widely used maybe because the last major useful adjustement was this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.
If you want a quarter month then have a quarter month.
Having a set of days that pretends to be a quarter month but rapidly falls out of sync is worse than having no quarter month at all.
If you gave any other reason for seven days, I wouldn't say it doesn't work right. But that reason makes the length of the week supremely half-assed.
> But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.
You're conflating two very different problems when you talk about it like that. Trying to make the units line up is legitimately difficult. Bad naming is not because of legitimate difficulty.
So you want to reform the week, the only time cycle that hasn't been altered in millennia to sync it with... what exactly?
Different groups of time have different goals. Scientific and technical applications only use the second. Years are useful both for agriculture and astronomy. Year subdivisions, weeks and months are useful for legal, social and personal purposes: weekends, holidays, celebrations, birthdays, embarrassing familiar reunions and all that.
They neither have to be in sync with anything, just being useful to track days in a year, nor they need to be mathematically pleasant, any programmers worth their salt will write you a perpetual calendar generator in five minutes.
No. I don't want to change the week at all. I'm just saying that "the week is 7 days so it's a quarter month" is broken as hell.
It used to be numbers earlier, Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed for them.
Apparently the Romans did not find hard naming even persons - they just went by numbers, as in Secundus, Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius, etc.
January, March, and June are named for Janus, Mars, and Juno. February, April, and May are not known to be named for any god, nor is there any particular reason to believe they are.
May is named after Maia, the goddess who oversees the growth of plants.
Compare what Ovid wrote about the name of May:
> You may ask whence I suppose the name of the month of May to be derived. The reason is not quite clearly known to me [because there are too many theories].
[J. G. Frazer's translation for the Loeb series]
That the name honors a Maia is one of three theories he goes on to present, the others being that May is named after the personification of Majesty [maiestas] and that May is named in honor of society's elders [maiores].
For April, on the other hand: classical Latin Aprīlis, use as noun (short for mēnsis Aprīlis month of April) of masculine of Aprīlis of April, of uncertain origin; perhaps < Etruscan.
(Oxford English Dictionary is a great resource. In the UK you can often get free online access through free membership of a public library.)
Absolutely true, but difficult to get access from the US without a university affiliation.
However, it isn't obvious that the OED is a better source on the meaning of a classical Latin month name than a classical Roman is. It's certainly possible, but not close to a slam dunk. And the OED is appropriately hesitant to say that it knows the origin of the name.
I'd be curious when the entry was updated, except that I can imagine the entry for "May" being updated for quite a few other reasons than to review the etymology.
(I might as well note that Ovid also presents two theories for the name of June, one that it is named in honor of Juno and one that it is named in honor of either the goddess Youth [Iuventas] or youths [iuvenes] in general, forming a contrast with May. There appears to be no real distinction between honoring Youth or honoring youths, despite the fact that honoring Maiestas and honoring the maiores are explicitly presented as separate theories.
I would say the June-from-Juno theory is on much stronger ground than the May-from-Maia theory simply because Juno is so much more important a god, but that is also open to debate.)
Curiosity should be rewarded!
"This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2001; most recently modified version published online September 2022)."
And there's a link to "Previous version: OED2 (1989)" where the etymology is given as: ... "The etymology of the Latin name is obscure; some ancient writers connected it with the name of the goddess Maia."
(Since you read Ovid probably there's nothing new for you in that!)
You already have 2 values: year and day, and they do not divide nicely. But they serve a practical purpose in a modern society, so we have to deal with them. The moon does not, but adds a third factor.
Modern calenders are designed to determine when people will work and when they will rest. The purpose is entirely different in our time.
Current calender’s historical roots only start from Ptolemaic and early Roman periods when the Romans created a planetary week. But it didn’t gain popularity especially in Western Europe. So they adopted the 6 day Jewish week and one day of the Lord’s day of rest.
Only where there was Roman rule and expansion, the new calender and planetary week was installed. Because the Romans needed to keep track of time to monitor work of their conquered territories.
Everywhere else, it was still the lunar calender/sun rise+set for time keeping and solar calender tracking the sun for seasons.
I hear you. I am just saying ‘modern’ is ‘western’ and the west is using time to clock in and clock out people who work. That’s for why if you are rich and don’t have to work, every day is weekend and every hour can be the proverbial ‘happy hour’.
In our time, calenders and clocks are used to track our obligations and when to file tax returns. I still follow the Indian Vedic lunisolar calender for moon cycles and seasons because it keeps me grounded and sane. I feel connected to the earth and sky.
It takes some effort to compartmentalise time for different purposes, but it gives me comfort and escape from the modern world. I am not disagreeing or trying to discredit the western and modern calender. I am just sharing what works for me and the origins of it from my culture/religion.
ETA: calendar has been misspelt as calender throughout. I think I did it once and for some reason, auto complete keeps using it. I don’t want to search and correct every spelling mistake. So this is a blanket correction.
We now have apps that inform us. But. If we can read a lunar calendar, we can organise our life around the moon cycles.
There is a reason the word ‘lunatic’ is derived from ‘lunar’. We are mostly made of water. Luna definitely has an effect on our bodies and our moods. Why isn’t it a good thing to understand the ecosystems around us that is time and space..and the ecosystem with us that is mind and body?
I accept that the moon has effects in the tides. As for the rest...
I have heard that before, but every time it was by someone who standed to gain something from me believing that - that when Moon is on the 7th House and Jupiter Aligns With Mars then Peace will Guide the Planets and Love Will Steer me to open my wallet and register to this self-help course.
Do you have any reference to a credible source that can prove that the Moon has those other effects you mention? Something like a test with a significant enough number of people involve, and a control group.
> Why isn’t it a good thing to understand the ecosystems around us that is time and space..and the ecosystem with us that is mind and body?
I strive very hard to understand the ecosystems around us (And beyond - from the most distant galaxies to how the atoms and sub-atomic particles make us work how we work). But I use Science for that.
However, I am a student of astrology tho’…maybe I can see how your natal Moon will steer you. But I am not sure how much you will appreciate it being invested in Science and all that. Take care.
When was the last time you planned a holiday for the waning phase of the moon?
We are really not all the same. HN is a big old forum and there is no such thing as a normal response.
That person was describing their personal reaction to ... something. I don't think that proscribing dogma is helpful in response.
I mean, it's not "unacceptable", free speech and all. It's just silly to jump in and "well actually" a joke, especially when the explanation is kind of why the joke was funny.
Do I really need to spell it out?
Don’t yuck someone’s yum.
Let people enjoy things.
Don’t rain on the parade.
It's not the only one. In Portuguese, the names of Monday .. Friday are literally "second .. sixth fair [day]", with Saturday and Sunday being "sábado" (sabbath) and "domingo" (lord's day).
I'm not sure which other countries follow the convention, but it's the numbering used in the Bible so I would be surprised if there aren't others.
shanbe = day (first day of the week after Jummah)
yak = one
do = two
seh = three
Literally just day one, day two, day three.
You count upwards in day number until you reach six, then it's Jummah again and it resets.
The city of Dushanbe, Tajikistan being part of the historical extent of the Persian empire and language is literally just named second day.
The word for Friday seems to be derived from “gathering” (probably due to weekly Islamic mass) and Saturday seems to derived from “sleep” (?).
Here in Norway we use 24 hours when writing; but we use 12 hour system when speaking - if that makes any sense?
I.e. we would say: "Vi spiser middag klokka fem (5)" [We eat dinner at five o'clock]; but we'd write it with 17 typically. We never use the terms AM/PM but can occasionally specify daytime/nighttime if it's uncertain which of the two we are talking about. I.e. "Jeg kom hjem fra jobb klokka fem (5) om morgenen" [I came home from work at five in the morning].
Does anyone know why? This has always seemed a bit weird to me. I mean the US is a fairly religious country and it's pretty much known to anyone that Sunday is the 7th day in Christianity?
And on the first day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the first day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the first day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
edit: just looked it up. Apparently Sunday = Restday is a catholic thing and Jews / Muslims use Sunday as their first day!
How and why America switched as Christian nation I'm still not sure.
Wow it really hasn't stuck. I stand corrected.
If Monday is day 1, then Saturday is day 6 and Sunday is day 7, so Saturday is no longer a weekend.
(Yes, I know that you can argue it a different way such that it still makes sense with Monday as the first day of the week. But it just feels "wrong" to me, probably because I lived the first 15-20 years of my life without even knowing that anyone else didn't consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Stuff you grow up with is hard to change.)
(Relatedly, no matter how hard I try, Celsius degrees never feel natural to me. Ditto for kilograms when talking about how much a human weighs. I've managed to get myself comfortable with meters and liters, at least, though I still sometimes have to "translate" in my head for things to make sense to me.)
At any rate, I do wonder when this difference solidified. Was Monday considered the first day of the week in western Europe during the period when Europe was colonizing pre-United-States? If so, when and why did the US (or colonists in the pre-US) switch to Sunday?
Sunday is religiously the first day of the week (the Lord rises on “the first day of the week…” (John)).
It has become the “last day” only because people rest after their jobs (i.e. at the end of the “week”).
But conceptually, it is still the first day. It is indeed the First day of the new creation (Redemption).
For German speaking countries: rather always#. In fact, you don't even say 3 PM. Just "drei". I think everything from 8 AM to 7 PM is considered "business hours" - and everything else needs clarification ("4 in the morning").
And we call 0:00 "12 Uhr Mitternacht" as well, I think nobody says "0 Uhr". But at least writing it down makes sense.
# Nobody I knows really uses "15 Uhr" to say 3 PM (people might sometimes do, but I never hear it, it sounds wrong, maybe "nerdy")
I guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
I haven't used "Die Party geht bis..."# for almost a decade now, that might be a hint.
#and my "parties" never ended before midnight for more than 2 decades now.
I believe the old Sega Dreamcast used this as its standard time in the menu system. Maybe that was for the online service. I would love to move to something like that permanently. Little ambiguity as to when people could meet across time zones.
The primary defect I see in the SIT proposal is that it isn't obviously based on the SI, but rather tied to the Earth. Defining a new unit that is 86.4 seconds long feels troublesome for everyone.
Maybe this is because I grew up when analog clocks were common, but it would feel extremely weird to say “15 o’clock” in speech instead of “3pm”. Even though it’s written down as 15.
I think you’re right that younger generations that grew up with digital are more likely to answer “fifteen oh seven” when you ask the time whereas I’d be more likely to read the same time and say “ten past three”
(Slovenian background)
Not correct, as others have pointed out. Regardless, why is it more or less logical for any particular day to be considered the start of the week? Hell, it seems that even in several countries that use Monday as the first day of the week, the names of the day reflect that Monday is the second day of the week!
I personally like Sunday and Saturday to be the opposite ends of the week. Sunday and Saturday are both considered rest days for the most part, and I think rest days are a good way to both start and finish your week. But I recognize that there's still really no logical basis for this; it's just what I grew up with so it "feels right". Just as those of you who grew up in a Monday-indexed week are used to it, so that "feels right" to you.
As a non-binary person myself I always find it interesting when people assume he/him for every random internet commenter. Happens on HN a lot.
Anyways, I find it’s best to use they/them pronouns (or rather remain gender/pronoun neutral) when referring to people on the internet, unless their pronouns are obvious.
There is Tranquility Calendar[1] that was proposed sometime back:
- Starts at the time when man landed on Moon. (Tranquility base)
- 1 year = 13 months each of 28 days (13*4 = 364) + 1 Armstrong day
- Exactly 4 week months.
Back in 2019, (50th year of moon landing) I happened to build a web representation of the same[2].
No, in Israel Sunday is the first day of the week too, because the weekend is Friday-Saturday (Shabbath). In Hebrew, though, the week days are named rather simply - except for Sabbath, they are just "Day 1" (Sunday), ..., "Day 6" (Friday). OTOH, that's exactly how they were numbered in the Bible, so...
First index in the array, 0.
Last index in the array, 7.
Just adding to the rest of the responses but Japan also has a very... contrived relationship with what counts as "the beginning of the week" and most people would say Sunday is that day.
That happens in Portuguese (brazilian, at least). Digital clocks go through 0-23 hours, but the second half is _sometimes_ named as 1-11 afternoon/night (whatever fits your taste). Hour 0 is never referred to as 12, though: it's always 0 or "half night"
Minor nit, but probably important since the equivalent vocabule exists in English: "midnight".
There's one other country in particular that firmly designates Saturday as the seventh day of the week: Israel. (Canada, Japan and Brazil also use Sunday as the first day of the week.)
I'm not religious, but I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, which worships on the seventh day, which for the past couple millennia has been Saturday. There is no end to conspiracy theories in the church about the seventh day of the week being designated as Sunday and how this (and particularly the compulsion to worship on Sunday instead of Saturday) is a sign of the end times.
I think Israel, and Jews in general consider Sunday the first day of the week.
"The Problem with Time & Timezones" - https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
I think most countries use 12h time casually (conversationally and so on), but most understand 24h time - and it's used officially (e.g. in state communications) in many. It's in the US though that people often need it explained.
So the US is not the only country that considers Sunday to be the first day, etymologically speaking. I think the first day in the Middle East is Saturday because people work on that day (on Friday is a day off, unless things changed since the 70s)
…
Many Arabic countries have the weekend on Friday and Saturday and work on Sunday. I think they probably all start the week on Sunday for this reason. No idea why the US does too though!
India uses 12h time (except in military talk; & railway timetable display boards) in day to day life. I have never heard in 29 years somebody using 15 as 3, or 20 as 8pm. Even till few years ago, atound 2008, flights times at Delhi Airport too were displayed in 12h, on mechanical card spinner display board (where a card with letter falls & next one comes, on a roll until desired letter comes). Seeing that board as a kid was highlight of my childhood trips to airport.rt.
Weekend is Friday and Saturday. I suspect many Islamic countries are the same way.
Swatch Time is just a rebranding of French Revolutionary decimal time displaying the hour number next to the minute. It was introduced a bit before the metric system in 1793 but was made optional in 1795 and finally dropped in 1806. Swatch has always been extremely good at marketing but I don’t like crediting a corporation for something they didn’t invent.
- In Germany we use the 12h format in day to day conversation
- Swatch time was so cool when I was a teenager
1) I've seen calendars with both starting days (Sunday/Monday). Anecdotally, calendars with Sunday as the first day seemed to be more popular when I was a kid; now, calendars with Monday as the first day seem to be more common.
2) The 12-hour system is far more popular here than the 24-hour system. Not that we don't use it, but in my experience, 24-hour tends to be mainly used in professional settings; 12-hour is used essentially everywhere else.
In Brazil, I think most people consider Sunday the first the of the week, in Portuguese the days of the week sound like ordinal numbers, Monday sounds like 2nd, Tuesday sounds 3rd, and so on. So it's pretty logical to consider Sunday the first day of the week.
And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.
France is one I'm familiar with.
In Britain, people reading out an important time presented in 24h format (like when discussing booking a flight) will usually read it out as fifteen thirty etc.
I like knowing what percentage of the day is over, a friend of mine says it'd drive her crazy knowing exactly how much time gets wasted.
In a few EU countries people have started implying Sunday could somehow be the start (even though they are protestant societies! Makes no sense), so I think the US is leaking lunacy to the rest of the world.
Reading through to the last bits I was foreseeing the launch of a specific space faring vehicle except it would have failed in some way because of non-metric units (purposefully not saying of which kind) thus closing by leaving a loose thread up another level of insanity.
Where I live we are taught that Monday is the first day of the week, yet most calendars start on Sunday. It's the sort of question you ask your teachers at school and nobody knows how to answer.
Brazil does the same as seemingly do Grece and Japan.
Also, in Portuguese, Monday is _segunda-feira_ which roughly translates as second-day.
First day of the working week is Sunday in Nepal. I assume they consider Sunday the start of the week, but I'm not Nepalese. This is just a random fact I remember from visiting.
Saturday as the Jewish Sabbath, Sunday as the ‘the Lord’s day” in Christianity.
Matthew 28:1
The Resurrection
[1] Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.
So, no, not all Christianity.
The current date order is still from 1940, when the state was opposed to Christianity.
https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sun...
"Nedelya" doesn't refer to the first day of the week, at least not now. It means is "week". I can see how it may have meant "do-nothing" and also refer to the rest day, but it doesn't place it at the front of the week.
Monday (ponedelnik) splits into "po" and "nedelya". "Po" is a repetition indicator, not "after", so it's more of something that happens every week.
As I've said - Tuesday is "2nd day", Thursday is "4rd day" and Friday is "5th" (pyatnitca - pyat - five). So 3 days out of 7 point at the start of the week being Monday. These names date to the ancient times, not something Soviets invented.
Wednesday ("sreda") does mean "middle day", but it refers to the middle of the work week, excluding Saturday and Sunday, which are named after Christian events and (likely) extended the original 5-day week.
So if you are to argue that a week that has 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days literally spelled out starts on its 7th day, the only explanation would be that Russians used 0-based indexing for the week days. Which is alright with me even if somewhat far-fetched.
PS. Also, the calendar reform was not a move against the religion, but because Russia Empire was literally 13 days behind the rest of the world, which was not very convenient.
"... 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th ..." should read "... 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th..."
> In 1978, the UN recommended that Monday be made the first day of the week in most countries. It was established in 1988, according to ISO 8601, an international standard for exchange and communication of date and time-related data.
I’m really curious about why the UN made that decision. Is this the primary reason so many countries now consider Monday the first day?
00-06 - night
06-12 - morning
12-18 - afternoon
18-24 - evening
Would need to refactor the name of "midnight" tho to minimize confusion. But if we use it as a starting point to count hours in a day from, it doesn't make sense to simultaneously designate it as a middle of anything.
(BTW, such subdivision is actually common in many places of the world.)
Anyway, to be a bit more substantive: What really baked my noodle when I was younger is the fact that the seasons and the night/day cycle are much more disconnected than it appears when you live on Earth. Of course, it makes sense when you understand the tilt/rotation thing, but still... it really weirds me out sometimes.
[0] English in this case, but any language, really.
This is what I was taught, I do indeed think it’s pretty silly, but it wouldn’t even be in the top 100 weirdest things about our language/culture/norms “space.” We’re surrounded by idiosyncrasies!
This would imply that a Weekend and a Weekbegin could easily coincide.
Not everyone, Israel has has Friday and Saturday off.
In the Bible it says God designated the last day of the week as a day of rest. From a Christian point of view, it would make sense that Sunday is the last day of the week, as it is the official day of rest. Otherwise they disrespect the Bible and skip the "real" day of rest.
I'm not religious or American, so from my relatively objective view it seems as if the people from the majority religion has ignored their holy book.
Consider the old nursery rhyme, Monday's Child, which ends with
Friday's child is loving and giving / Saturday's child works hard for a living. / And the child born on the Sabbath day Is bonny and blithe, good and gay.
Of course ISO 8601 didn't just drop out of thin air, but what caused it? I think it's a misunderstanding mixed with ignorance. Ignorance of the fact that the Jewish Sabbath, referred to everywhere in the Bible, is on Saturday, combined with people reading in the Ten Commandments about observing the Sabbath on the last day of the week and associating that with their own church attendance on Sunday, which they then conclude must be the last day of the week.
A more thorough reading of the Bible would have set them straight, as would some knowledge about history or other religions.
I actually used to think that Monday as the first day of the week was just a corporate thing. I first noticed it when I started working and work agendas were surprisingly insistent on starting on Monday. But I figured that was because the weekend is meaningless to the work week, so why not just lump it all together at the end? And then I learned about ISO 8601 and was completely flabbergasted that this was an official standard.
Depends on the Christian. If you mean the Puritans, from whom present-day prescriptions (such as no or limited alcohol sales on Sunday) derive, you may be on to something. If you mean the Sabbatarians, no doubt they have an explanation, but I don't know it. If you mean a Seventh-Day Adventist, you'd be wrong, because they still hold to Saturday as the seventh-day and the sabbath. If you mean a Catholic or one from another denomination, the Catholic catechism teaches that Sunday is the fulfillment of the spiritual truth of the Jewish sabbath, and most other denominations understand similarly.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190604142831/http://www.unixgui...
edit: lol, too slow
The recent official standardisation of Monday to be the first day of the week was a mistake.
And the months are numbered (January = "first month"),
Who are we to argue with the people who have finally gotten an act together to number it properly?[1]
[1]: alright, yes, Sunday is still the odd one out and doesn't have a number.
This also coincides with the work week where the first workday is Monday, then the weekend ends the week and a new week begins with Monday.
Not absolutely, it could be even more hilarious, if PM/AM switches happened at 11:00 and 23:00, not at 12:00 and 00:00. Or even better, the switch could ignore seasonal timezone shift.
My devices all show 12h too.
The thing is most people know if it means the evening or morning.
But when programming, and dealing with times from all over the shop - please show me 24h clocks!
I always felt that DST was invented to prevent people from realizing that they are forced to wake up and get out of the house before dawn during the winter. It would literally alienate people from work life.
Japan does too; I blame the American occupation (and plenty of other illogical things).
I assume Israel must too since shabbat, the seventh day of rest, is Saturday.
It actually reminded me of, and made me sad for the days of the old internet. I don't think this should be on twitter but it's own site
Calendars starting with Sunday: Nambia, Trinidad and Tobago. Calendars starting with Monday: Benin.
Sunday is the first day of the week in much of the middle east
What do you mean by this? I mean, what behaviors do US people exhibit to show this to be true?
I was born in the US and have lived here almost my entire life. I consider Monday to be the first day of the week, and I haven't seen anything in US culture to indicate that other people disagree or behave otherwise (except for the default behavior in some calendar apps in the US locale).
In Europe, printed calendars and apps have Monday in the first column.
Not for religious reasons or because I consider Sunday to actually be the first day of the week, but for practical reasons: It gives me a clearer understanding of the workweek. It moves Wednesday (in my language called "middle of the week") into the week's center. It deemphasizes the weekend for planning (and thus for planning work), making them better rest days.
YMMV.
When the weekend was invented, Sunday as the sabbath was still a real thing for many people. I have to wonder if originally only Saturday was conceived as the weekend, followed by the week start and sabbath of Sunday. Then, as Sunday became secularized, the weekend was extended to include Sunday.
The author uses they/them pronouns. And more likely their ADHD episode started to wear down, rather than something they took started to wear off.
A few notes:
- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
- US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;
- May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) but I consider omitting the whole DST thing a major missed opportunity. :)
Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. I believe they still maintain some Internet presence but mostly gave up on promoting it. Good luck breaking 1000+yo habits.