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by thriftwy 1369 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.