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>>>So sennight is seven days-but a week is from Sunday to Sunday?<<<
Helen,
I would use week in both of your examples. I would say that something will occur in a week, or a week from today, meaning in 7 days, or next Thursday. I might also say that something will occur next week, meaning sometime in the period that will start Sunday and end the following Saturday. I might also mean the period starting Monday and ending Friday, but in that case it would be obvious that I mean business days from the context.
I agree that most Americans probably know that fortnight means 2 weeks (or they at least understand that it means something between a week and a month), but I can't think of a single time that someone has used fortnight in casual conversation with me.
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FishonaBike mused Yep, we definitely use "fortnight" here amongst the dark satanic mills. Never ever heard even a reference to se'ennight(s) though. Why not just say "week"?
I suppose you can have 5 or 6 day working weeks. Is that relevant?
You're assuming that the use of both fortnight and sennight were "designed". Like all such terms, my bet is that they just grew into usage. Fortnight just means "any fourteen-day period but let's not be either too exact about the number of days or assume that it begins on any particular day". Sennight was probably used in the same context. I assume its use died out when "week" - one syllable shorter - became more popular.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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fortnight - why not just say "two weeks"? (same number of key strokes, same number of sylLAbles)
Actually, when using one of these terms in conversation one would need to say "a fortnight" as opposed to "two weeks", which doesn't require an article, therefore making it one syllable shorter.
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>Where as a week starts with Sunday. So sennight is seven days–but a week is from Sunday to Sunday?
Helen,
I agree in general with xara's response to your post, except for the bit about "next week" meaning Sunday to Saturday, similar to your definition above.
I am surprised that anyone still thinks about Sunday as being the start of the week - I thought it was an antiquated thing, presumably springing from the Christian religion and the importance of going to church on that day. For me, Monday is clearly the start of a new week. Sunday can't possibly be, as it is part of the "weekend".
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Marty,
It all has to do with calendars. On 99% (if not more) of our calendars the first day of the week is printed up as Sunday. You really cannot use the weekend argument though since things can have two ends – a front-end and a back-end. You never, for example, say a piece of string has a beginning and an end, just two ends.
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In reply to:
It all has to do with calendars. On 99% (if not more) of our calendars the first day of the week is printed up as Sunday. You really cannot use the weekend argument though since things can have two ends – a front-end and a back-end. You never, for example, say a piece of string has a beginning and an end, just two ends.
bel,
You probably wrote that tongue-in-cheek, but I'll bite anyway.
You can't extrapolate the concept of ends from objects to time. Surely you wouldn't say that January was at the end of the year (or one of the two ends), or that the first is an/the end of the month, or dawn is an/the end of the day!
Oh, and I haven't used a calendar for years. Is there still a market for them?
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to do with calendars...
Agree, Marty. Besides, in business diaries of most kinds, surely the two (Western) weekend days are frequently marked as minor spaces, with the week perforce starting on Monday?
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In reply to:
On 99% (if not more) of our calendars the first day of the week is printed up as Sunday.
This is certainly true on almost all of the wall calendars here in the USA that show a month at a time. Frequently business oriented one day per sheet calendars will lump Saturday and Sunday together on one sheet but they show no preference whatsoever for start, end or any specific time during the week unless they have day names in German (Wednesday is Mitwoch, mid-week). When I was in Russia several many years back in January I picked up a calendar in Russian. They have Monday as the first day of the week and I found the calendar almost impossible to use because of that. I still think of Monday as the beginning of the week. Is this a contradiction?
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>>>I am surprised that anyone still thinks about Sunday as being the start of the week<<<
Certainly it has quite a bit to do with the calendar. Sunday is always the first day, unless, as mentioned, the calendar lumps the 'weekend' into one section. Sunday being the start and Saturday the end appeals to me for another reason as well. Wednesday is the middle of the week. If Sunday were last then the week would be very unbalanced.
In addition, in every job I've ever had, the pay period either ended on Friday or Saturday. My most recent job ended its pay period on Saturday, so the week definitely began on Sunday. In previous jobs where the pay period ended on Friday, one could say that the week began on Saturday.
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