Talk:Monday

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—Yamara ✉ 05:13, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

We shouldn't have bias in describing the position of the day in the week. Saying "Traditionally, yadayada, but some modern Europeans like to think of it as yadayada" has bias. Saying "Some think this, and some think that" doesn't have bias. - Khendon 14:44 Jan 3, 2003 (UTC)

Saxon moon deity?

I've checked in a couple of dictionaries for the etymology of the word "Monday", and they say that it just comes from words meaning "day of the moon". No mention of a Saxon deity named "Mona". The only references to Mona that I can find in books about mythology relate to a place associated with druids, which I gather has been idenified with the island of Anglesey. So was there really a Saxon moon deity named "Mona", or not? -- Oliver P. 03:37, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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"the normal 24-hour working week" Blimey. I'd like to work where you do! My normal working week is nearer 37 hours. Or have I misunderstood? TimR 22:09, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I don't like Mondays

Can we put in the boomtown rats song or is it too trivial? Might fit with Mondayitis? --BozMo|talk 15:40, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Wasn't that song about a girl who freaked out on a Monday and shot several people, and later gave the excuse for her deed "I don't like mondays."?

Yes, Brenda Ann Spencer. The event itself might be material for the article, but hardly the song. -- Jao (talk) 15:20, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I've never heard of the Boomtown Rats or the song. The song "Monday, Monday" by The Mamas and the Papas is far more popular, but I fail to see how either belongs in the article. There's a quote in the Gilmore Girls episode, "Partings," where Lorelai says, "I don't like Mondays, but unfortunately they come around eventually." Do we really need to list instances of Monday in popular culture? -- 67.42.107.14 (talk) 20:43, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

About the portuguese name

Don't know in other languages, but the portuguese name for Monday is not "second day", but "second fair" ("Segunda feira"). More info in the portuguese wikipedia --SugarKane 12:46, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Circadian Rythms

"A possible reason for Mondayitis is that human circadian rhythms are incompatible with the normal 35 to 40-hour working week." Does anybody have a source for this? Judzillah 18:57, 2005 August 8 (UTC)

Australia

I've never noticed that Australians regard Monday as the first day of the week. People I speak to regard it as the second day (albeit the first day of the "working week"). Avalon 22:49, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Really? Not in my experience. After all, why start the week in the middle of the weekend? --Angry mob mulls options 11:26, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I've never heard it referred to as the first day, in any of the places I've lived here. I'm removing the reference since I don't think it's held as such by the majority. That's only my experience, but I'd like to see a source indicating the contrary if the mention is to be made. Radix 12:28, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh well, Sunday has always been at the weekend to me --Angry mob mulls options 12:20, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm an Australian, I work in education and I have never, ever, not once seen or heard of anything except Sunday, in all my 28 years of life, referred to as the beginning of the week.

I too am an Australian and in school we were taught that Sunday was the first day of the week. When someone says 'next week' it means from Sunday onwards. In Australia though Monday is often referred to as the 'first day of the working week', but not the calendar week.

Sunday indeed is regarded as the first day of the week in Australia, not Monday. Gizza^{Discuss ©} 10:13, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Current Event Tag

What is it doing here? -- Lord Snoeckx 01:06, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Revamped Monday thru Thursday

I sincerely hope I haven't treaded on anyone's toes by restructuring these pages, but there really wasn't any consistency among them, and some pages looked awful messy. Of course feel free to revert or edit what I've changed. Unfortunately I never haver had time to do Friday to Sunday. Annatto (talk) 19:15, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

As all the other days of the week show pictured of antique artwork, I figured the Galileo picture was more in keeping with the style than the previous moon photograph, hence why I changed it. Annatto (talk) 19:20, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Russian word meaning?

It says that the Russian word понедельник means "After Sunday", but doesn't it come from the word неделя, for week, so it would mean "Beginning of the week" or something like that? In any case, if the section is called "Origins of the name", shouldn't it be talking about origins of the English word "Monday" rather than just random information about the word in other languages? I guess the fact that it is moon-related in all the other mentioned languages is relevant, maybe the entire piece about Russian is unnecessary. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.74.155.201 (talk) 20:00, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Typo

New to wikipedia just learning by going around and correcting small typos Christopher ohio (talk) 02:02, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Unity Issue

"The Russian word...is понедельник (poniediélnik)...The Japanese word for Monday is getsuyōbi (月曜日)...Monday is xingqi yi (星期一) in Chinese..."

In Russian we have the Cyrillic followed by the romanization in parentheses, whereas for the other two the romanization comes first followed by the native writing style in parantheses. I would change it, but I'm wondering if there's some guideline as to which format is correct. Brett (talk) 06:08, 2 October 2008 (UTC) bye

Claim of "original research" re proleptic Gregorian 0001-01-01 = Monday

I was told that my statement that proleptic Gregorian 0001-01-01 was a Monday was original research. I claim that this was, for the most part, calculation rather than "research", and the little "research" was simple use of common and publicly-available knowledge. Let me explain:

Pick up almost literally any reference work with a section on calendars, and it will give the Gregorian leap year rule. I have seen this rule repeated in many places since I was a child. I have even read transcribed and/or translated source texts on this rule. Asking for a reference of this rule is like asking for a reference that the Earth is round. Using this rule, and knowledge which is if anything even more common (such as the number of days in a year and in a week), and simple calculation, I can tell that 400 years makes a whole number of weeks with no days left over, a fact which I have seen in print as well as in Wikipedia.

We are now halfway there. The other half is to correlate this 400-year cycle with a known weekday. Our date 0001-01-01 would (we now know) fall on the same weekday as its anniversary at 400-year intervals. Five such intervals carry us to 2001-01-01. Look this date up on any calendar -- I used the JavaScript Date function in the browser I was using at the time -- and you will see that it was a Monday. QED. (P.S. I just checked my cell phone calendar and this date was indeed a Monday.)

If a computer program claims that 0001-01-01 was not a Monday, then either (a) its calendar was not proleptic Gregorian (Julian, perhaps?) or (b) it contains a bug (does it use the correct leap year rule? is its year 01 = AD 1 or AD 1901 or AD 2001? is its month 1 = January or February?).

As for claims that this information is perhaps not as useful as I had claimed: for one, the programming language REXX uses proleptic Gregorian 0001-01-01 for its day 0, perhaps because it seems a very natural, easy-to-remember starting point. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.35.187.148 (talk • contribs) 01:46, 28 March 2009

All of this either constitutes Original Research, or constitutes improper synthesis. Just please give the sources that verify the claim. It shouldn't be that difficult.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:03, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

This is absurd. But even if I am to do it this way... if I remember correctly, the relevant 16th-century papal bull (text at [[1]]) mentions explicitly that immediately after the Gregorian calendar change in 1582, the dominical letter will change to C. This agrees with the table given in the dominical letter article. From the text of this bull and calculation (along with the definition of dominical letter), one can by a similar but different path verify my claim. If you want more details regarding dominical letters (a not unreasonable request), I refer you to the calendar attached to the bull, which I am having trouble finding online. And while we're at it: I believe that mere calculation constitutes neither original research nor synthesis, according to Wikipedia guidelines. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.35.187.148 (talk • contribs) 02:47, 28 March 2009

This may well be absurd, but it is the way Wikipedia works. The purpose is to avoid the kind of hoaxes and self-promotion that caused embarrassment a few years ago. The kind of circuitous article-hopping you suggest for verification is not acceptable for two reasons: first, it improperly invokes other Wikipedia articles a sources and, second, direct citations need to present on any claim that is subject to doubt. FWIW, the calculation is beyond my capabilities, and I suspect that may be true for many other readers of Wikipedia, as well. That is why I resorted to online calendar calculators, one of which told me that 1 January 01 (Gregorian) was a Saturday; another told me that 1 January 00 was a Saturday and, since this was (proleptically) a leap-year, 01 January 01 would indeed be a Monday. Neither one would tell me why it is "convenient" for either year 00 (i.e., 1 BC) or 01 to begin with any particular day of the week (I personally favor Wednesday, for absolutely no good reason at all, it's just a gut feeling), so this statement remains POV until corroborated by a reliable source. Thank you for mentioning dominical letters. I have never heard of them before, and their relevance to calendars and the convenience of starting year 0 or 01 on a particular weekday sounds intriguing.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:17, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The reason I mentioned dominical letters was because they were part of the calculation. The papal bull confirmed that the Wikipedia dominical letter table was correct (at least for that one example). Knowing the dominical letter for one year, you can count forward and backward to determine it for other years -- that is how the table was constructed. This table can also be (and should perhaps also be) spot-checked by means of whatever calendar you have handy, such as a wall calendar, pocket planner, or cell phone calendar. I know because I constructed the table myself (although using a different base year) and performed a number of spot checks on it -- I believe I used the JavaScript date function for at least some of these spot checks.

Also, I had a sould reason for using calculation to pull the date to check from 0001-01-01 to 2001-01-01. The former date is hard to verify and can only be accessed by extrapolation from an existing calendar. The latter date is much easier to verify as is it (with good reason) available on more calendars: it is within our lifetime, whereas 0001-01-01 is not. We also have enough newspapers and records from recent times to confirm beyond any shadow of a doubt what day of the week 2001-01-01 was: we can't say the same for 0001-01-01. That is the real reason I pulled the calculation to 2001-01-01. If there is any shadow of a doubt in your mind that 2001-01-01 was a Monday, look at newspapers, bulletins, calendars, etc., from then. Then using the 400-year rule, go back to 0001-01-01. If you doubt the 400-year rule, then calculate this: (365*400)+(400/4)-(400/100)+(400/400) and then divide by 7 and verify that it comes out even with no fraction left over. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.208.249.18 (talk • contribs) 20:25, 28 March 2009

Calendrica is the online calendar conversion program described in Calendrical Calculations by Reingold and Derschowitz, which is considered a reliable source. It confirms that 1 January 1 in the proleptic Gregorian calendar was a Monday. It also confirms that 1 January 1 in the Julian calendar was a Saturday. The Time and Date calendar is wrong. According to the REXX/400 Reference manual page 87, the DATE(Base) function returns the number of complete days since and including the local date 1 January 1 in the Gregorian calendar. For REXX, this was day 0 because the modulo function DATE(Base)//7 returns 0 for Monday. For the calendar and other documents such as the dominical letter attached to the papal bull Inter gravissimas, see Les textes fondateurs du calendrier grégorien in French and Latin. Both Vettius Valens (c. 160) and Saint Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 360) used two overlaping weeks, one beginning on Sunday, the other beginning on Wednesday. Athanasius called the day of the week in his Wednesday week the "day of the Gods" because it was the principal week described by the astrologer Vettius Valens and Anthanasius explicitly numbered it 1–7, 1 being Wednesday. See Week-day names#First Hour of the Day.

Despite this, Anon's statement "For purposes of calculation, it may prove helpful, even necessary, to treat the week as beginning on Monday, because in the proleptic Gregorian calendar, January 1 of the year 1 was a Monday." is patently false due to the words "helpful" and "necessary". By its very nature, any computer calculation hides whatever day of the week it treats as first from the user (though not from the programmer). So it does not matter what day of the week is first as far as the program is concerned. Furthermore, REXX treats 1 January 1 Gregorian as the zeroth day of the week as Anon states, not the first day of the week. Many other programming languages determine the day of the week by taking the Julian day number modulo 7, which, like REXX, starts its count of days with 0 (but at 1 January 4713 BC Julian, not Gregorian), so its day of the week is also numbered 0–6, 0 being Monday. Adding 1 to convert this into 1–7 is an extra step which is neither helpful nor necessary. Totally different is the Lilian day number which starts with 1 at Friday. Removing the false helpful/necessary phrase leaves the trivial fact that 1 January 1 Gregorian is a Monday, which does not improve the article in my opinion. — Joe Kress (talk) 03:20, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

By "first", I did not mean "given an array index of 1", but rather simply "first" in the ordinary sense of the word. And anyway, where do you suppose the Julian day number or its equivalent comes from? Calculation. And where do you start your calculations? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.27.151.55 (talk) 03:38, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Why only moon?

Looking at the list of translations, I was surprised to notice that only names referring to moon or first day of the week have been listed. I find it unlikely that it could really be so, that all languages have it that way. In Finnish the day is called "maanantai", which _to my ear_ sounds like a transcription of the Swedish word måndag, meaning Monday. Most other weekdays have names similar to their Swedish counterparts, as well. However, since Finnish comes from a different language family than Swedish, the words don't actually mean anything at all in Finnish - and have never meant. If it was called "moon day" in Finnish, it would be "kuun päivä", which is kinda different from "monday". I'd guess the names must have been brought by the Swedes when they took over Finland, transforming it from the last European wilderness into the system of all land area divided into states with fancy flags.

First day of the week

Various anonymous IPs (probably the same person) keep trying to insert a claim, in this article and all the other days-of-week articles, that the Gregorian calendar specifies that Sunday is the first day of the week. I see nothing in the Gregorian calendar article to support this, indeed quite the opposite: the current article states that opinions vary over this matter. As far as I understand it, the Gregorian calendar specifies that today is Tuesday 11 September 2012 rather than some other date; it doesn't specify whether today is the second or third day of the week. If someone can provide a reliable source to prove I'm wrong then of course I'll change my position. -- Dr Greg  talk  12:51, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

The order of the days of the week are not mentioned in the original 1582 Gregorian calendar documents in Latin (bull, canons, and two calendars) because the Gregorian calendar is only a modification of the Julian calendar used by the Roman Catholic Church before 1582. So anything in the calendar that was not changed continued in use unchanged. However, the principal day of the week, called dies dominicus (Lord's Day, equivalent to Sunday) is mentioned repeatedly, but without its order relative to the other days of the week. The best source for the days of the week in the Julian/Gregorian calendar is De temporum ratione (On the reckoning of time) by Bede (725). Specifically, in Latin (Giles 1863 edtion): "Caput VIII: De hebdomada" or in English (Wallis 1999 edition): "Chapter 8: The week". Bede clearly stated that the Gentiles dedicated the first day of the week to the Sun, and he named the days of the ecclesiastical week (which had weekdays numbered from Sunday) as dies dominica (Lord's Day or Sunday), feria secunda (second weekday or Monday), feria tertia (third weekday or Tuesday), feria quarta (fourth weekday or Wednesday), feria quinta (fifth weekday or Thursday), feria sexta (sixth weekday or Friday), and sabbatum (Sabbath or Saturday) in Ecclesiastical Latin (See Names of the days of the week#Days numbered from Sunday). Bede stated that this usage orginated with Sylvester I, pope 314–335, but Wallis notes that other Church Fathers used it earlier.

Modern calendars are almost always displayed as grids of four or five weeks for each month, each week beginning with either Sunday or Monday. This is a recent technique that began in the mid-19th century as a result of the Industrial Revolution. All earlier calendars, including the calendars in the Latin Gregorian calendar documents, were displayed as 12 monthly columns of 28 to 31 days applicable to any year. The only indication of any weekday was the Dominical letter (A–G) beside each day of the month. The user had to consult a table to determine the Dominical letter for a specific year before he could determine the weekday of any date. — Joe Kress (talk) 23:09, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

The name of Monday since late Antiquity has been feria secunda. It can be safely left as an exercise for the reader to figure out if this suggests if this means that it was considered the "first" or the "second" day. The tradition of considering Monday the first day of the week is related to the notion of a "week-end", a term that first appears in the 17th century. --dab (𒁳) 13:54, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Museums and restaurants closed on Mondays

I was hoping to find an explanation of how old the practice is of closing on Mondays. Greg (talk) 07:42, 11 March 2017 (UTC)