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Comment by vander_elst | Hacker News Reader

Very curious to understand the thinking behind this, why should the weekend be E and A? My first approach would be to have the weekend on D and E which would seem to be the end of the week.

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> Very curious to understand the thinking behind this, why should the weekend be E and A?

So that the extra day on leap years could be inserted in a weekend while having its own unique number.

That would also just work with D E and F. Or am I missing something?

I would like F to be inserted in the middle of the weekend, not at the end of it.

Right. WeekEND. It's the end of the week. Not one day at the start and one at the end. It's why, currently, the week starts on Monday.

In Hebrew Sunday doesn't have a name, it's simply called "Day one", this is also true in Portuguese, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others.

So no, the week does not start on Monday, it starts on Sunday.

The name "Weekend" came long long long after Sunday was considered the first day of the week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date

ISO says Monday

That’s a late 20th century invention, and not universally followed. Consider Unix time functions, which predate the ISO standard and follow what’s common practice in America even today, that Sunday is the first day of the week. Of course, Sunday was the first day of the week in Europe for over a thousand years and that practice has not fully been extinguished.

> Right. WeekEND. It's the end of the week.

This only works in English though. The rest of us use the word "weekend" as a block.

It also works in German, Dutch, and presumably lots of other languages. In which ones does it not work?

In French. "End of week" would be "fin de semaine" but we don’t say that, we say "weekend". Which is understood as these two days when most people don’t work.

If anything, "fin de semaine" would refer to the last working days before the weekend.

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