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Comment by octobus2021 | Hacker News Reader

octobus2021

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"...

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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 five day workweek is a fairly new thing (early to mid 20th century); the day numbering thing is much older.

No reason other than some 6000-7000 years of record keeping by Hebrews, tracking the 7th day.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat

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.

> Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian

The days in Hebrew are simply numbered, First day, Second day etc. except for Shabbat

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