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by KMag 4027 days ago
> Chinese use 星期一 / "weekday one" for Monday.

Sure, Monday through Saturday are numbered 1 to 6, but Sunday is "weekday Sky" or "weekday Heaven", which is considered to come before "weekday one".[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#/media/File:First_Day_of_...

3 comments

Portuguese uses ordinal numbers to name days from Monday to Friday, starting from Sunday: Monday is segunda-feria (second day), Tuesday is terça-feria (third day), all the way to Friday, or sexta-feria (sixth day).

Interestingly, there's no first day: Saturday and Sunday are sábado and domingo, respectively.

A couple points:

- That map is factually incorrect. Sunday is considered the end of the week in China, not the beginning. I note in passing that the image file is attributed to "own work" -- we all make mistakes.

- The 天 of 星期天 doesn't have the sense of "sky" or "heaven". It has the sense (well, originally had the sense) of "day", the unit of time. Compare 天天 "every day"; 今天 "today"; 明天 "tomorrow". We know that this is the original sense because the name descends from the Christian term 礼拜天 "the day of worship". Consider also that 周天 alternates with 周日, and while 日 shares the sense "day" it does not share the sense "sky".

So days_of_week[0] is actually Sunday. Assuming a zero based index.