This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :)
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.
> 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.
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.
What part of English Canada? In Alberta or Ontario (the parts I've lived in, though I was pretty young when I lived in Ontario) I've literally never seen a calendar with Monday as the first day of the week that I can recall.
The person originally bringing this up referenced printed calendars always having Monday as the first day of the week, so it seems reasonable to use an observation of printed calendars with Sunday as the start of the week as a rebuttal.
Yes this, except it's not even a rebuttle, I'm just genuinely curious where this might be someone's experience because it's very at odds with my own.
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.
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....
In IT, this mess leaks to places it really shouldn't. I've never permanently lived nor worked in native english place, but the amount of time I've seen somewhere in some web app or work outlook weeks starting on Sundays... its maddening, you easily make mistakes in good faith that can have pretty bad consequences, without realizing them.
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...
Walk into a stationery store in British Columbia and you'll find both options.
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.
The Bible does not say that Sunday is the 7th day. It says that Saturday, the Sabbath, is the 7th day. And that Jesus rose on the day after the Sabbath, which means it was on the first day of the week. And that's the day most Chistians have adopted as their day of worship. (Except Seventh Day Adventists who keep it, as their name suggests, on the 7th day: Saturday.)
If your church preaches differently, they should read their Bible more carefully.
Seventh‐day Adventists are definitely the most prolific Christian keepers of a Saturday sabbath, but they are not totally alone. The next most prominent groups I can think of are Seventh Day Baptists and Messianic Jews. SDAs are in the tens of millions worldwide, Messianics in perhaps the hundreds of thousands, and SDBs under one hundred thousand.
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.)
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.)
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).
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.
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!
IIRC it was very common for early Christians, who were mostly Jews initially, to go to temple on the Sabbath (Saturday) and then have their own meetings on Sunday, as they didn’t consider them separate.
I think we can trust the Jews to have kept the Sabbath fairly consistently. The Christians literally changed their reserved day of the week in honour of Jesus' resurrection. Luckily the fact that this was the day after the sabbath is completely unambiguously pinned down in the Bible.
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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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").
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.
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??
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> I don't think anyone assumes Sunday as the first day.
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.
On a side note, it's not 100% clear (to me, at least) that the word for Monday (ponedelnik) means "per week" or anything about the week per se.
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]
Note that this off-by-one is exactly the difference between Jewish/Biblical-based weeks, where the Sabbath is clearly the last day of the week (based on Genesis, the day when God rested), and more "revisionist" Jesus Christy-based weeks, where the day that Christ was resurrected is considered more important than the Sabbath and takes its place as the end of the week.
While the majority of Christians meet on Sunday and consider it the “new” Sabbath or the fulfillment of the Sabbath, in commemoration of Jesus’s resurrection, how does that relate to restructuring the week so Sunday is the last day? The Bible is clear that Jesus was resurrected on the first day of the week, the day after the Sabbath.
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, though am not sure, that once Christians stopped observing the Jewish Sabbath and instead resting on the Lord's day, it also became natural to consider it the end of their week, instead of the beginning.
Then why does the US, a very young culture compared to Europe, universally consider Sunday the first day of the week? Calling Sunday the seventh day must be a very recent development.
The USA was founded and its culture heavily influenced by very deeply religious Protestants. While by the time of the founding of the USA, Sunday was decently well established as the seventh day in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, most protestants were Bible originalists.
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.
Actually Orthodoxy is arguably more inclined to treat Sunday as the first day of the week as witnessed by the Greek language.
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).
Well, in Polish, Monday is poniedziałek, which means "after Sunday" (Sunday is "niedziela") and not "start of the week" and it looks analogous in Russian...
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.
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.
Friday literally means Day of Frigg (Old English), referring to Frigga, the wife of Odin. Yes, Freya is believed to be the same goddess as Frigga, but the day is named after Frigga not Freya.
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?
> 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 :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans.
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.
Yeah I agree. 12h time is the natural consequence of using analog clocks where one rotation of the hour hand on the dial represents 12 hours. But I guess it won't be hard to represent 24h if the speed of the hour hand is halved, although I have never seen such clocks.
In Finland its common to use 12h time in conversation. Digital clocks are 24 hours, but many people still use analog clocks, which are always 12 hours.
And for what its worth, the name for Wednesday, keskiviiko, means midweek.
Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday?
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.
So, the standard US weekend is Saturday–Sunday, even amongst the Sunday=1 holdouts. I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. Not to suggest that the holdouts are a minority, I honestly don’t know but I doubt it. I think, apart from the initial puzzlement of recognizing the inconsistency, most of us don’t give much thought at all to which day is 1. “Weekend” generally is used colloquially to mean whichever two simultaneous days the speaker or audience is off work, insofar as they have two consecutive days off work.
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 say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US.
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.
There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?
"Next" has terrible ambiguity, beyond the phrase "next week." If it's Monday and someone says "next Thursday" do they mean the coming Thursday (+3) or the one after that (+10)? I assume the latter, except when it's said by people who I know disagree!
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...
Tell me about it. My wife and I cannot agree on the meaning of "next" for almost anything, and we are Spanish speakers.
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".
I don’t know if it would translate, but I’ve had good outcomes navigating with my brother by saying “following” instead of “next”. As in “okay we’re coming to Delaware street and we’ll take a left at the following intersection”. It’s not even language my brother uses but he immediately understood “next next not this next” and so I stuck with it.
Oh wow. The only context in which I (and people around me) use "next" like that is with days, which is confusing in its own right, but at least it's contained.
“Next Thursday” vs “next week Thursday”. The former, for me, means +3 and the latter +10. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when someone I know has said the former but implied +10.
Interesting to see so many people here who do interpret it that way.
In my area it's fairly common to say, for example, "X happens every Thursday. Do you want to go this Thursday or next Thursday?" which is equivalent to +3 versus +10.
Same with my wife; she tells apart "this Thursday" and "next Thursday" in exactly the way you describe. I don't. Predictably, all sorts of confusions ensue.
That kind of ambiguity is everywhere, though. If it's Friday, and I say "next Monday", those two days are close enough that you may need clarification - do I mean "this coming Monday" or "the Monday after that". Or another example for day 1 = Monday, if on Sunday I said "let's do that next week", you may need the same form of clarification.
Human speech doesn't often work on just the literal meanings of words though, hence the ambiguity. Very very rarely at 10PM on a Sunday night does anyone mean "tomorrow" when they say "See you at the club next Monday". They usually don't mean that because we have the word "tomorrow" and that's more precise.
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.
There's a real ambiguity, but it isn't in the examples you gave.
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".
Both cases are still ambiguous because even though “this” Tuesday has already passed on Thursday, no one gets confused when you say “I’m having a cook out this Tuesday, want to come?” because the future tense of the sentence automatically excludes the Tuesday in the current week which has already passed.
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”
> I don’t see any ambiguity in “next Monday”. It literally is saying the next day which is Monday.
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.
Sorry I read your post incorrectly. If I say, let's do something this week, it means up to and including Sunday. If I say next week, it means after the upcoming Sunday.
That makes sense for places where the week starts with Monday, but I guess this week means up to and including Saturday for Americans if it's actually normal that the week starts with Sunday.
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.
I disagree with the sibling poster. Your first paragraph is correct.
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. :)
Your 2nd paragraph is correct. No one actually thinks about when the week starts, it's almost universally understood to be Monday based even if the calendar says Sunday based.
No. It starts from the creation story where creation starts on Sunday and ends on Friday and then the seventh day (Saturday) is the day of rest - the sabbath.
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.
Thank you for the additional detail about the origin of Sunday as a sabbath, and the nuance that it’s not observed on Sunday by all Christians. I was not actually thinking about the resurrection story, or even about how Sunday came to be observed as such, but it led to some interesting reading.
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.
Weeks are always displayed as beginning on Sunday in the US (I get confused and annoyed when a calendar app is improperly localized for en_US and shows weeks as starting on Monday).
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 way I've always thought it was meant to be is that the "weekend" is really the "week ends," meaning start and end, the same way a shoelace has 2 ends.
That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...
It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".
Think of it as "weekends" as in the limits of the week not "weekend" as in the last part of the week.
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.
Why would I think of a weekend not as a weekend but as weekendS, which is 2 days, one of which is the end and another is beginning? It's called weekend, as in the end which follows the week. Which therefore starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.
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?
> 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.
The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.
There are many reasons to call Sunday the first say of the week. Mostly historical ones. Weeks have existed for far longer than the US or in fact any modern country has. Or the concept of a 5-day work week, in fact. The Monday as the first day of the week is modern revisionism.
There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?
The Hebrew calendar kept changing as they moved and adapted the calendar designed by the ruler of the lands.
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.
I’ve seen this theory proposed, but is it actually widely accepted by historians? Wikipedia says that a connection “has been suggested”[0], which doesn’t seem like very strong wording.
Yes..it was proposed by a linguist, iirc. There is only one 2015 paper where I have read it. But it seems most plausible. Consider this. The Greeks had no calender. Cannanite Hebrews had no Egyptian admixture. So what remains is the sandwich period from where the record keeping must have been directly influenced by the Babylonians.
A lot of people have already commented on how Israel and the Middle East consider Sunday to be the first day of the week, but I'd like to add that the week itself seems to originate in Judaism (Wikipedia, "Week"):
"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".
Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space.
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.
The point of comical absurdities like this is precisely that they appear comical or absurd if you don’t know the reasons for them being the way they are. That doesn’t mean there are no reasons, it’s just that those reasons aren’t necessary or even relevant to appreciating the apparent absurdity.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to explain why it isn't funny, but why I don't find it funny. YMMV.
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.
Many people going to read this thread and think "yes, everything is completely backwards and nonsensical, I hate all forms of historical traditions and reasoning"
I'm also making a comical absurdity just fyi. Do people like this exist? I don't know
> Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They didn't have too many personal names in general, IIRC about 20 or so commonly used, including numeric ones (there's even Decimus - I guess they had big families). And looking at how Ceasar is always Julius Ceasar (while his personal name was Gaius) it looks like they didn't use it too much outside of family and close friends. Which kinda makes sense - if you know 10 guys with personal name Gaius, it's not very useful to say just "we're having a party at Gaius' place tonight".
Also, if you start in March, it suddenly makes sense that leap year adjustments are done in February (and also that it's the shortest month to begin with).
> Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno...
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.
> 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].
Oxford English Dictionary says: classical Latin Māius (adjective and, short for Māius mēnsis , noun), probably < the name of a deity cognate with the name of the goddess Māia (see Maia n.) and with magnus great (see magni- comb. form).
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.)
"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!)
Hum, no. There is no reason not to change it (except for inertia, what is a better reason than any you will see). It is logical (once you get over the fixation with 60), but none of that logic is a good reason to keep it.
This reminds me of the discussion the other day about how the A_n paper sizes are superior because you can fold them in half to get the next size down. Just like having a more logical calendar - it would be nice but not very useful. The value is in the network effect of everyone using the same system (so kind of like the "inertia" you mentioned).
just because something has historical reasons does mean it makes sence today. There is no reason for the Moon to have any place in a modern calendar.
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.
I disagree. Moon is the closest celestial body to earth and we have historically been able to make very accurate observations and calculations based on its orbit and waxing and waning phases.
I think the point is that our current calendar does have historical roots involving the moon but isn’t actually useful for predicting moon phases, tides, etc. and thus is not in fact an important mechanism for modern calendars.
The purpose of a calender is to measure and predict the march of time. Ancient calenders used the moon and sun to determine time and seasons.
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.
But the Moon has no influence in modern everyday life. It did in the past, for scheduling fishing, to attack an enemy tribe when there’s no moon, or to hunt nocturnal animals when there is.
Moon influences us in three ways: Time, Tide and Light.
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?
> We are mostly made of water. Luna definitely has an effect on our bodies and our moods
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.
No, I don’t have the time to search for a credible source about the effect of Moon upon Planet Earth.
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.
> Why is it unacceptable to you for someone to explain why they do not find something funny?
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.
I believe that it is in spirit of this website that you are encouraged to explain poorness of a joke, if you find it poor. After all, if it inspires curiosity what's the issue?
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
This is along the same general idea as the Persian/Farsi day names, you've got Jummah which is the western Friday (Islamic day of rest), then the rest of the days are named shanbe, yakshanbe, doshanbe, sehshanbe, and so on.
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 rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;
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].
It could be, but since it could also be interpreted as sometimes used, I wrote a comment to say that we use the 12 hour system exclusively when we speak about time, and the 24 hour system for written purposes. Perhaps that's what he meant, but I'm not sure...
Both of your first points are factually incorrect - I’d have to imagine some bubble-bias involved, but many countries aside from the US use the 12 hour clock and start their calendars on Sunday.
There was a more significant effort to decimalise time (and the calendar to some extent) after the French Revolution, along with introducing the metric system everywhere. People hated it and they eventually switched back. A bit of related trivia is that France only accepted the Greenwich Meridian on maps/charts on the condition that the international meridian conference (of 1884) also concluded that the convened nations also resolved that decimal time was a good idea and they should work towards it.
>- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
Sunday is still considered the first day in Christianity. Jesus rising on the first day led to Christians celebrating the resurrection on Sunday and it eventually eclipsing the Saturday Sabbath. Also much of Latin America and Southern Africa also consider Sunday the first day of the week.
Ignoring the religious angle entirely, I've always thought it was weird that people consider Monday the first day of the week, because to me, Sunday and Saturday are at either "end" of the week, hence they are called "weekend" days.
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?
The argument I’ve heard against this is that Sunday is a week”end” day, not a week “start” day - here interpreting “end” as “terminator” rather than something like “bookend”
It is more logical for Monday to be first, because it comes right after end of the last week - week-end. The last two days are weekend - end of the week.
In Hebrew the days of the week are named numerically: first day, second day etc. Sunday is the first day of the week in israel. Saturday, the last day of the Hebrew week is the only one not named numerically, it’s called sabbath.
> - 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;
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 live in Germany and I have the exact opposit experience from everything you just said. the only people that use "drei" or "halb fünf" etc. are those one generation older than me, and everyone says "null Uhr" or "vierundzwanzig Uhr" (depending on which day-crossing you're referring to), I have honestly never before heard the phrase "12 Uhr Mitternacht". "Die Party geht bis 24 Uhr" oder "..bis 0 Uhr". Nobody says "die Party geht bis 12 Uhr Mitternacht", do they?
I guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
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.
Yeah, that was the idea, they invented it to make things easier for people around the world communicating over the Internet. They even launched a series of watches which displayed Swatch time. It was so cool, too bad it never took off :(
It's not obvious why a new system is needed. UTC, TAI, or unix-time are sufficient.
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.
I don't see what makes the second less tied to the Earth than the day. The SI system is for scientific purposes, it doesn't have units important for civil purposes like liters. If you were to completely redefine civil timekeeping (good luck!), the day feels like a better unit to focus on.
Yeah, I played around with a decimal time: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ but eventually realised that my seconds, minutes and hour equivalents were just names for some of the decimal places of the Julian day number.
> 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;
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”
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
Nit: foone uses they/them pronouns and has previously expressed some displeasure with the way they get misgendered when their posts hit hacker news. Queer folks seem to agree that if you aren’t sure what someone’s pronouns are, they/them is a good default (only until they tell you or you find out the correct pronouns).
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.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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...
In Denmark we use 24h, but we call them by their 12h equivalent, e.g. "15:15" is "a quarter past three". However, you could also say: "It's now 21 30" to signify half past nine. Or some people would say: "It's half 10". Okay, having 24h clocks don't make it easier it seems.
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
I can only talk about the people I personally know and I've asked this question myself (because it's funny and interesting from a cultural perspective) and most people I asked said "Sunday", although as I said it's not set in stone.
> however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;
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"
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
>* - 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;*
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.
In Arabic, Sunday is Ahad (first) Monday is Ithnain (second) and so on until Friday which is Jum’a (gathering) and Sabit (comes from Sabbath I think?) as Saturday.
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)
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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!
Living in Brazil, I always heard that Sunday is the first day of the week. Accordingly, we do name most of the week days by number, sort of. Monday is ”Segunda-feira”, which a literal translation would be “Second fair”. The “Third fair, Fourth fair, Fifth fair, Sixth-fair”.
> 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
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.
Saudi Arabia used to have Thursday and Friday as weekend. They changed that recently (2013) to Friday and Saturday, because that gives them a bigger overlap with the rest of the world, which is good for business.
> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have.
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.
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.
Colloquially, lot of places use 12h - it's always "we're going to the restaurant at 8", never "at 20" or "at 20:00", at least in the countries I've lived or visited. But officially it's still 24h - which may be more confusing or less confusing, depending on your point of view.
And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.
There are certainly countries where a translation of "16 o'clock" or similar is the default way to say that time.
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.
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
I don't know that we necessarily consider Sunday first in any way except in the default / traditional presentation of weeks in calendars -- which is to say, it's a visual thing but not something that seems to impact work or life in any meaningful sense. I think pretty much all calendaring programs can show Monday as the first day if you prefer.
The Swatch time is a variation on the fractional day. Astronomers use it, with .00 being noon and .50 being midnight. You can extend it to any precision you like, 1/100,000th of a day makes for a good 'decimal second.'
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.
It matters in the astronomer's case (which does use local noon) because that's when they do their work. For the version where .00 is midnight in the local time zone, well... it's how we live our lives! I'd argue the week is more important than the months for the same reason.
> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off)
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.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
What is the advantage of adopting any of those, other than being a bit more in sync with other countries? None of them imply anything other than semantic difference, there is very little advantage and a lot of pain if we were to adopt those "standards".
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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.
In Hebrew the days of the week don't really have names. They are simply called (direct translation here) "first day" "second day" etc. Except for Saturday which is called "Shabbat" instead of "seventh day".
"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.
Thanks for the link. It had another interesting fact:
> 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?
The US, Canada, China, Japan and most of South America. Oh. And the Phillipines consider Sunday the beginning of the week. And someone just shouted at me that Israel considers Sunday the beginning of the week, but that seems unlikely to me.
Well, since Saturday and Sunday are called "weekEND", so it logically follows that Monday is a "week start". Most people think about it like this: Monday is a start of a new work-week, and then you get two days of rest at the end of the week.
Just call it "evening" if it's before midnight. That way you get four nicely subdivided periods.
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.)
I feel we've just rediscovered why appeals to grammar[0] don't actually solve much of anything. (Not saying you're appealing to grammar, just that grammar is generally not that useful for discerning... anything really.)
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.
That only applies to things that are not obviously oriented. No one would try to argue that when they said "we'll do a recap at the end of meetings", what they meant is both the start and the end. This is not ambiguous at all and I don't even believe you believe in this argument.
Well I’d suggest the “obvious” orientation is actually the effect of what you believe the words to mean, not the cause.
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!
Mostly because Saturday and Sunday are collectively known as the weekend and it doesn't make a lot of sense to start the week in the middle of what everyone agrees is the end of the week.
I think it's a bit naive to expect sense from anything related to dates and times at this point. It's all just accumulated history, and historically, Sunday has always been the first day of the week, no matter what people today think about it.
What I find interesting is that many Americans consider themselves Christians and that will influence their decisions. So one argument can be made from that point of view (I'm not religious myself).
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.
This misunderstanding is probably where the idea that Monday is the first day of the week came from. Biblically, Saturday is the Sabbath, the last day of the week. But early Christians came together before and after work on the first day of the week, the day Jesus rose from the dead, which is explicitly the day after tue Sabbath. Eventually that day was also made a free day amd added to the weekend. But it was always the first day of the week until ISO redefined it.
If you’re interested…
the reason Christians worship on Sunday is because Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the week. It wasn’t an immediate thing as at first almost all Christians were Jewish and continued the seventh day day of rest and gathering for worship.
No, the biblical day of rest is the Sabbath, the Saturday. The fact that most Christians keep the first day of the week instead of the last day is because Jesus rose from death on the first day of the week.
Yet the word "Sabbath" refers to different things to different Christians.
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.
I’m actually really interested in this. Clearly in Jesus’s time the Hebrew week went Sunday–Saturday. That definition remained at least for long enough to make into Ecclesiastical Latin and further into, e.g., Portuguese (segunda-feira, etc.). So why does ISO 8601 go Monday–Sunday? Was it codifying existing practice in Europe? When did that practice begin? Was America colonized before Europe switched to Monday–Sunday, or is America’s Sunday–Saturday a fundamentalist reversion to something more Biblically accurate?
I live in Europe and I never learned anything other than that Sunday is the first day of the week. It's only very recently that I'm starting to notice an insistence that Monday is the first day. From my perspective, ISO 8601 seems to be the cause of that, and having an ISO standard on your side is certainly strengthening that position, but I think it's simply wrong.
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.
Another commenter posted a source that mentions in passing that ISO 8601 was the result of a 1978 UN declaration that Monday should be the first day of the week. Now I wonder where that came from!
You’re not wrong that “the Sabbath day” has sometimes been used by Christians to refer to Sunday, but the context of this thread is that a comment claimed that calling Sunday the first day of the week is inconsistent with the Bible, and that’s plainly not true.
> 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.
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.
It’s totally arbitrary (as well as totally immaterial) whether the week starts on Sunday or Monday (or any other day for that matter). The fact that the US does it differently than many other countries really isn’t a big deal. Your downvotes show the whole bike shedding nature of the issue. The debate is so contentious because the stakes are so low.
I'm honestly not sure what "bike shedding" is but numerical values for days of the week very much count when building any software containing calendars (or any dates really) to make sure it works properly in different geographic regions.
Historical reasons. Sunday has always been the first day of the week. Because yet another religion than the 4 mentioned before explicitly defines Saturday as the last day of the week, and everybody has always gone along with that. Probably because it was always like that anyway.
The recent official standardisation of Monday to be the first day of the week was a mistake.
Silly reason, but I like that Sunday being the first day keeps the week symmetric. You have the first and last day of the week being days off (in most places), and you have Wednesday in the middle. It's not very logical, but neither is any part of our calendar system.
Or you just say, Sunday is the end of the week and Monday that start of the next one. Funnily enough this is the first time I've heard as Sunday as the first day of the week. I'm from Germany where Monday is the first day and Sunday the last.
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.
Sunday is the first day of the week in Israel, not just on paper but very much in practice. I know this because Israelis I worked with will be unavailable on Friday but they will start emailing you Sunday morning.
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.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
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).
Printing all calendars and design all calendar software with Sunday in the first column is a big clue that most Americans consider Sunday the start of the week.
In Europe, printed calendars and apps have Monday in the first column.
Being European, I prefer "Sunday in column 1" calendars.
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.
Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work
Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.
Except for Friday-Saturday is the weekend in quite a few countries especially islamic ones. Israel also has Friday-Saturday weekends to make observing the Sabbath easier. There may be other exceptions as well.
The concept of a weekend is a recent development that I don’t think really corresponds to what the first day of the week is (which was conceived of as Sunday for thousands of years before the weekend was invented).
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.
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.