In many countries, calenders start the week on Monday. In others, sunday is the first day of the week. I remember someone once saying that that it was originally “weekends,” as in one on each end of the week, but I can’t confirm that. Etymonline simply says that the weekend was originally the time from saturday evening to monday morning and that the meaning has shifted to mean Saturday and Sunday. So that makes even less sense if sunday is the first day of the week, because weekend encompassed some of the last day of the week and some of the first day of the week.
So what’s the deal? What’s the first day of the week and why?
The weekend is the longer-than-24hours period between the end of the last workday of the week and the start of the next workday.
Without being an expert and referring to sources I would guess that Sunday as the first day of the week is the original in Christian culture, based on Saturday/Sabbat being the last day, and that those of us using Monday as the first days do so with the same reasoning as that behind naming Saturday and Sunday the weekend. The non-working days are the weekend.
Saturday and Sunday being the “Weekends” sounds like silly folk etymology to explained the perceived discrepancy between two seperate views of the week, the everyday worker’s view and the official calendarmaker/church view.
No such thing as “Christian Culture”. The romans and jews killed the christians who had the one true religion, apart from some tiny few. Then the Roman Emporer heard of a more acceptable version and ran with it, not realising he was forgetting that the one true religion started as a suicide cult…
There is no culture to transfer ..
lets look at Circumcision.. if Christians have a culture, then christian USA would get it from their founding fathers…
Circumcision in christian europe ? nope.
It only re-occurs in the USA as the jewish doctors take control.
The seven day week with Sunday as the first day is indubitably a part of the Christianity of the western world that’s existed for the last 1500 years. Its origin makes no difference to the OPs question, except in the sense of tracing the seven day week further back. If you want to discuss your own personal definition of “Christian culture” I suggest you start a new thread on that since it’s completely irrelevant to this one.
Having a week 53 with New Years Day in it is disrespect? How about you show how unpopular it is by listing entities refusing to use it v. those using it.
For the Jews and early Christians, the seven-day week started on Sunday – of course, it wasn’t called “Sunday,” it was “Yom Rishon” = “Day One” in Hebrew. The sabbath was the seventh day (what we now call Saturday.) Christians added Sunday as a day of celebration because that’s the day of resurrection, they called it “Lord’s Day.” Over time, the Christian leadership decided that two holidays each week was too much, so they conflated the two onto Sunday.
By the way, there’s a certain illogic, since the third day of the week is called Two’s-Day, and the fifth day is called Third’s-Day. (Sorry, but note the date of my post.)
We need to go back to making 25th March the official New Year’s Day. Among other benefits, this would mean that September would indeed be “seventh-month” and so on.
About “weekend” in Edwardian England and in French language:
In In Search of Lost Time (the novel previously known as Remembrance of Things Past), Odette, the near-courtesan, who is the most au courant of fad-followers, likes to pepper her speech with Anglicisms. She says the word “weekend” in English.
What would be the English people’s twist on the word that it elicited such a frisson in her that the word could plausibly have no exact equivalent in French? Ie, why would she think that was le mot juste, what was its nuance, its je ne sais quoi in French?
[QUOTE=John]
20 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.
[/QUOTE]