> From: dickey@clark.net
> Date: Sun, 27 Jun 1999 04:16:35 -0700 (PDT)
> I regard the monday=1st as a variant rather than the standard also.
> It would be interesting to know how that numbering came about.
Perhaps it made sense to someone that the weekend should end the week.
I guess the week numbering part of the standard was aimed primarily at
production planning and other commercial contexts, where only Monday
to Friday really count. And arguing from the Bible is not necessarily
persuasive in international contexts.
For what it's worth, when I was young (Denmark, about 1970) I was
taught the same story about Sunday being the first day of the week
because Saturday used to be the Sabbath, the 7th day --- and I think
Danish calendars back then were printed that way too (Sundays first in
each row), but I don't have any old ones lying around to check.
My old encyclopedia (from 1898) agrees, by the way, and mentions that
Wednesday is called Mittwoch ("middle of the week") in German for
exactly this reason. So Sunday as first day of the week is not just a
US invention, it's the way it used to be in all of Western Europe.
But still, the practice in Denmark changed (to using the ISO standard)
sometime while I wasn't looking --- I'm sure I didn't notice any
discussion, even though I've always been interested in calendars. It
probably happened at the same time that week numbers began to be used
at all --- we never had an old competing system, so people didn't
notice the change.
Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@diku.dk> (Humour NOT marked)
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