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.
