A 10:23 99-06-27 -0700, Lars Henrik Mathiesen a écrit :
>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.
[Alain] For one, this caused me problems for years as it is one thing which
even those used to localization do not think of initially: the shape of
publicly-displayed calendars. Of course when it is a totally different
calendar, when the year is not the same, or when the notion of
7-day-judeo-islamo-christian week does not exist, you have no choice. But
when it is supposed to be the calendar of the Christian era (or even
Japanese which uses the same template except for year numbering!), with a
7-day-tradition week, differences may be misleading and are indeed so, for
international business travelers. It has misled me many times in setting
meeting dates in my international peregrinations.
I do not know who did the change but indeed in Europe, Sunday was the first
day of the week on calendars for a while in many countries. In North
America (whether English, Spanish, or French-speaking [except in FR
DOM/TOMs]), Sunday is still shown on calendars as the first day of the week
(at least, correct me if I am wrong, I think that even Mexico is the same,
but I may be wrong in this case, it might be dual usage too, I only went
there on vacation, and not as a business traveler, so I did not remark as
much).
That said my own personal "agenda planner", in recent years showed this
(still North American) practice in the body of the booklet for everyday's
usage but the summary calendars at the end (which spans years) used to show
Monday as the first day of the week... How confusing even to set meeting
dates here!!! There was a fix this year in this useful booklet, they show
the Monday in the *second* column in the summaries, and, tricky, the first
column looks like a Sunday, but it is not. Rather, it is a shaded column,
showing the ISO week number. It does not completely removes the possible
confusion for weekends, but for those like me used to the other type of
calendar, it helps plan business week days for meetings, as the work days
always begins on Mondays indeed in the circles I usually attend (we made
two exceptions when we worked in Egypt and Israel, and the change was well
received as it made us live to the expectations we had, working in the
field of localization.
I think Europe harmonized calendars sometime in the 1960's. In France,
nobody in my friends, at least those to whom I talked about this (some are
in the 60's of age -- I never talked about this with my friends older than
70, unfortunately -- I used to have a friend there beyond the 90 years of
age but he died recently) recalls to have seen a calendar showing Sunday as
the first day of the week, so the revolution may have started there (again!)
In my opinion, it might have something to do with laicization of business,
and the fact that Monday is the 1st day of the week in ISO might then has
for its source a will to change from what might have looked like
discriminatory religious practices (it is still discriminatory for many
reliogious groups, but maybe less than before, I mean the ISO practice).
The fact that even Christians had to change their habits (they were on the
Jewish calendar indeed, except for the year numbering!) -- well, not North
Americans yet -- may be a clue to that theory.
I took risks in writing the last paragraph, I hope I won't be flamed too
much. I don't pretend it is the absolute truth. (; (:
Alain LaBonté
Québec
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