Asklemmy

42525 readers

992 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Where in history is the reference point of modern week day countdown? [SOLVED] (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I mean, if today i.e. is Sunday then someone long time ago should have said "Today will be Sunday" for the first time in a period from today that is multiple of seven. I was assuming that it was Pope Gregory XIII in October 1582, but looks like he is not. I failed in googling and duckduckgoing out the answer, so I ask for Lemmy's collective wisdom!

EDIT: so question is not about the origin of 7-day week and sequence of weekday names, but about the exact reference point (day) of today’s weekday countdown. From when have people stopped adding or ommiting any adjustment 'out-of-week' days (like in Babylon or Rome) and kept counting to seven till today? In other words, there should be a point exactly N x 7 days ago from which the 7-day countdown has not been interrupted. Or at least the earliest known day in history that everyone on Earth agreed upon as a reference point

EDIT 2: Solved by https://lemmy.world/comment/1852458 Thanks everyone!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ok, let me rephrase your rephrase to be what question I think you're trying to ask.

At some point we had decided on a seven day week with week names. That's fine. But we must also have decided at some point that today was Wednesday in this system.

So I think you're asking "what is the first day we all agree was definitely a Sunday, such that all Sundays after were based on that". Or put another way, at what point did the days of the week get locked to the days of our year.

I don't have that answer, but your question confused me, so I've reworded it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, thanks, that's pretty much it! Except we cannot really make days of the week get locked to the days of our year because 365 is not divisible by 7, and we're adding 1 day to February every 4th year on top of that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Your phrasing on this post was confusing af. The other poster clarified it and then you just made it confusing af again with this response. Thanks

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And every 400 year we don't add the extra day, except every 2000 year when we do it anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

the numbers for this are skip every 100 years except every 400 years but yeah it's kinda wack