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Comment by FastEatSlow | Hacker News Reader

I thought that that in Slavic languages Sunday would be the first day of the week, since the Polish for 'monday' means 'after sunday'.

EDIT: got 'monday' and 'sunday' the wrong way round

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In Russian, Sunday is "Resurrection Day" and Monday is "The Thing concerning Not-Doing being in the Past-Perfective Tense" (po + ne+del + nik)

It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"

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.

Only in Russian.

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.

Ponedelnik etymologically means the day after the not-doing day. Nowadays the connection is lost because Sunday is no longer called “nedelja”.

Depends ;). In Croatia its still called nedjelja (Sunday) and ponedjeljak (Monday).

Hmm, and the week is the not-done-thing?

Etymology is hard, the week “ne-delya” could be understood as something that cannot be divided, “not-divisible”. I am not sure which one is correct.

nope, monday is „after sunday”

Thanks for catching that, I got my English the wrong way round.

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