# The change of meaning of the Russian word, неделя



## CitizenEmpty

The word, неделя, means week in Russian. It literally meant no "не-" work "деля". Usually in the Christian cultural sphere, a day without work would be Sunday. But how come the meaning changed from "Sunday" to "week" just in Russian, and not in other Slavic languages?


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## ahvalj

This secondary meaning seems to be first attested in the Ostromir Gospels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostromir_Gospels), written in the northern city of Novgorod in 1056 or 1057, i. e. practically at the very beginning of East Slavic literacy:
_въ въторьникъ ·в̃· недѣлѣ ева̃г отъ иоана
_"on Tuesday of the 2nd week Gospel of John"
(http://www.ponomar.net/files/ostromir.txt: 12.2 7).

There are some speculations as to the origin of this usage, but none is convincing.


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## ahvalj

To put things into perspective, the Rus state was officially christianized in 988 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Kievan_Rus'), i. e. about 70 years before the first attestation of the word _недѣлꙗ/neděļa _for "week". There is no linguistic evidence that the Slavs had a concept of week and days of the week before christianization: all the respective terms are christian in origin. It is not strange, therefore, that during the spreading of those alien ways to measure the time, one of the terms was misunderstood and received an additional meaning that eventually replaced the original one.


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## fdb

The Slavic term evidently is a calque on Greek σάββατον, itself a loan from Hebrew, meaning both “week” and “Sabbath” (i.e. Saturday), continuing Semitic usage.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> The Slavic term evidently is a calque on Greek σάββατον, itself a loan from Hebrew, meaning both “week” and “Sabbath” (i.e. Saturday), continuing Semitic usage.


But _σάββατον_ (actually in our case _σάμβατον_ as we had discussed recently) is borrowed as _sǫbota_ "Saturday" and the use of _neděļa _for both "Sunday" (never "Saturday") and "week" is specifically Old Russian. The standard explanation of _neděļa_ is that it is a calque of _ἄπρακτοϛ ἡμέρα_ (hence the feminine, since the Slavic _dьnь_ "day" is masculine).


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## fdb

I understand your point. In Christian parlance "Sabbath" is used both in its historical (Saturday) and its Christianised (Sunday) senses. But perhaps you will agree that the use of the same word to mean both "Sabbath" and "week" is a reflex of the Greek usage.


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## ahvalj

fdb said:


> I understand your point. In Christian parlance "Sabbath" is used both in its historical (Saturday) and its Christianised (Sunday) senses. But perhaps you will agree that the use of the same word to mean both "Sabbath" and "week" is a reflex of the Greek usage.


Yet it is strange that the last christianized part of the Slavdom is the only one that inherited this double usage over the shoulders of the other areas. May be this is what is called in biology "the founder effect": when the christian community in the north consisted of several dozens of people, the terminological preferences of one educated cleric may have influenced the usage in such a profound way.


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## Ben Jamin

CitizenEmpty said:


> The word, неделя, means week in Russian. It literally meant no "не-" work "деля". Usually in the Christian cultural sphere, a day without work would be Sunday. But how come the meaning changed from "Sunday" to "week" just in Russian, and not in other Slavic languages?



In older (and sometimes also in modern dialects) Polish the word "niedziela" was used both for the day of rest and for the whole week. It was a kind of meaning extension from part to whole (pars pro toto in Latin). The churchmen teaching Slavs Christianity apparently did not introduce a special word for "week" to the Slavic languages. The Polish word for week is "tydzień", meaning literally "this day", most probably meaning initially "Sunday", but introduced to avoid ambiguity. Russians made it another way round, taking in use a new word for "Sunday".


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## fdb

Ben Jamin said:


> It was a kind of meaning extension from part to whole (pars pro toto in Latin).



I think I gave a better (historically more correct) explanation for this in no. 4 and 6.


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## Ben Jamin

fdb said:


> I think I gave a better (historically more correct) explanation for this in no. 4 and 6.


Your explanation is certainly based on the fact of the Koine Greek use, but it does not work whith other Slavic languages.  
None of the Romance languages uses a word for "week" that earlier meant "Sunday", and neither does modern Greek, or any other Slavic language than Russian.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Your explanation is certainly based on the fact of the Koine Greek use, but it does not work whith other Slavic languages.
> None of the Romance languages uses a word for "week" that earlier meant "Sunday", and neither does modern Greek, or any other Slavic language than Russian.


It also works in Bulgarian. Arguably the most strongly Greek influenced Slavic language.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> It also works in Bulgarian. Arguably the most strongly Greek influenced Slavic language.


"Week" is "sedmica" in Bulgarian and Serbian, a Greek calque (from _hebdomada_), and "Sunday" is "nedela", so I don't know how it works here.
But Macedonian has the same word for "Sunday" and "week" (nedela).


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## berndf

It is a bit dated but неделя=week exists in Bulgarian too.


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## entangledbank

In Georgian also, _k'vira_ means both "Sunday" and "week".


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## ahvalj

It appears that the meaning "week" is attested across the Slavic languages quite widely, even if in dialects or old texts. Trubachov's Slavic etymological dictionary (_1997 · Этимологический словарь славянских языков. Праславянский лексический фонд. Выпуск 24 (*navijati(sę)/*navivati(sę)–*nerodimъ(jь):_ 115–116 — https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJekFpSzktY2pxME0&authuser=0), which I should have checked before replying two days ago, mentions the meaning "week" for Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Old Czech, Upper Sorbian, Polabian, Old Polish, Slovincian, Old East Slavic (Ostromir Gospel cited in #2), Old Ruthenian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. As far as I understand, the Russian peculiarity is simply that this second meaning has replaced the original one: modern Russian speakers don't even realize that this word might mean "Sunday" in the past.

*Update.* Latvian has borrowed this word from Russian (as _nedēļa_) in its modern meaning, "week" (Sunday is _svētdiena_, literally "holy day", with the Slavic first part). Lithuanian (before the 19th century language cleaning) also used the Russian _nedėlia/nedėlė_ "week" and, curiously, _nedėldienis_ "Sunday" (_Fraenkel E · 1962 · Litauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: _490 — https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_7IkEzr9hyJR0d1QjRhbmNzdU0&authuser=0).


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## Dib

A reverse example from a completely different cultural sphere: hafta in Urdu has come to mean both week and Saturday, while the Persian original only means a week - literally the group of seven (haft).


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## sotos

CitizenEmpty said:


> The word, неделя, means week in Russian. It literally meant no "не-" work "деля". Usually in the Christian cultural sphere, a day without work would be Sunday. But how come the meaning changed from "Sunday" to "week" just in Russian, and not in other Slavic languages?



I don't see much "change of meaning", seeing that from the Greek point of view. In the 10 Commandments we have "on the seventh day you worship the Lord". In the original Greek "seventh" is "hebdome" (not Sunday or Saturday), while the set of 7 days is "hebdomas". The 7th day is Sunday for the Christians, but  the acoustic difference between _hebdomas_ and _hebdome_ is not much for a Russian. 
I find more interesting that they adopted the Gr. word "doulia" (work), sometimes pronounced "d'lia" in rural Greece, from the ancient "δουλεία".


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## Ben Jamin

sotos said:


> I don't see much "change of meaning", seeing that from the Greek point of view. In the 10 Commandments we have "on the seventh day you worship the Lord". In the original Greek "seventh" is "hebdome" (not Sunday or Saturday), while the set of 7 days is "hebdomas". The 7th day is Sunday for the Christians, but  the acoustic difference between _hebdomas_ and _hebdome_ is not much for a Russian.
> I find more interesting that they adopted the Gr. word "doulia" (work), sometimes pronounced "d'lia" in rural Greece, from the ancient "δουλεία".



Slavic *delati *is not a Greek loan. It is a cognate, with PIE roots.

And remember, 10th  century Slavs did not speak Greek. They used the word "nedelja" not knowing that it was called _hebdome_ in Greek.


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## fdb

sotos said:


> I don't see much "change of meaning", seeing that from the Greek point of view. In the 10 Commandments we have "on the seventh day you worship the Lord". In the original Greek "seventh" is "hebdome" (not Sunday or Saturday), while the set of 7 days is "hebdomas". The 7th day is Sunday for the Christians, but  the acoustic difference between _hebdomas_ and _hebdome_ is not much for a Russian.



ἕβδομος is an adjective meaning “seventh”. In Gen. 20:10 the LXX (which, of course, is not “the original”, but a translation from Hebrew) has τῇ δὲ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἑβδόμῃ σάββατα κυρίῳ τῷ θεῷ “on the seventh day is the Sabbath for the  Lord God”.

ἑβδομάς is a noun meaning “a group of seven”, and then “week”. The two words are obviously related, but not the same.

On the other hand, the Hebrew loan word σάββατα (plural), or σάββατον (singular) is used both for “Sabbath” and for “week”, the latter in Luke 18:12 δὶς τοῦ σαββάτου “twice a week”.


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## francisgranada

Ben Jamin said:


> ...  The Polish word for week is "tydzień", meaning literally "this day" ...


The same in Czech and Slovak (týden, týždeň). I have the impression that these Western Slavic words originally didn'd mean "week" in the sense of a "calendar unit" or a period starting with Sunday morning and ending with Saturday night, but they expressed rather a 7-day interval in general. A hypothetical  example for illustration: "I shall  return (on) _this day_" could have meant "I shall return _on the same day_ as we have today", i.e. after a _week_. 

Two observations that seem to support my idea:

1. As far as I know, in Polish there is (or at least there was) also _tygodzień _which seems to come from a declined form (genitive) of _tydzień,_ i.e. "ty*go* dnia", with the possible meaning of "*on* this/that day". 

2. The Slovak "tý*ž*" (today a bit old-fashioned "ten*že*") in _týždeň  _ suggests rather the meaning "the same" than "this/that".  

According to the above "logic", _неделя _was primarily not a whatever 7 day interval, but rather the period from "Sunday to Sunday" (Sunday is the first day of the christian week, that's why  _неделя _  and not Saturday or some other day, of course). Or, alternatively, неделя could have been used also in the sense of e.g. "I shall return after 5 Sundays", i.e. approximately after 4-5 weeks ... (ok, it's only a speculation - it would be interesting to see some written attestations concerning the practical usage of this word).


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## Gavril

francisgranada said:


> The same in Czech and Slovak (týden, týždeň).



Similar words for "week" exist in Slovene (_teden_) and Croatian (_tjedan_), although I don't know how the vowels in these words are normally explained. If these words were completely transparent compounds meaning "this day", then they would look like *_tadan_ (in both languages).


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## OBrasilo

- Gavril: There might be an explanation, at least for Slovenian. If we assume Slovenian had the word _taj_ like Serbian and Croatian have today, they might have created _tajdan_. Or maybe even _tajdĭn_ (dĭn- for day would explan a lot of developments in West and South Slavic languages). Now, the natural Slovenian refle of CĭC is CeC (compare _pes_ from _pĭsŭ_ - also _pes_ in Czech but _pas_ in Croatian), I can see how the word might have become _tajden_. From there to _teden_ is not far. But, this is mere speculation.

Edit: And the croatian word might have originated from Kajkavian (its absence in Serbian for example, IMHO rules out Shtokavian origins), in which case we might be dealing with older _tědĭnŭ_ that became _teden_ in Slovenian and _tjeden_ in Kajkavian, then the Kajkavian form changed its ending to _-dan_ under Shtokavian influence and was borrowed into Croatian Shtokavian.

The Slovenian word for day, _dan_ might have also been influenced by neighboring Shtokavian. But please note that in some dialects, it's _dǝn_ or even somewhere midway between that and _den_.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Ben Jamin said:


> "Week" is "sedmica" in Bulgarian and Serbian, a Greek calque (from _hebdomada_), and "Sunday" is "nedela", so I don't know how it works here.
> But Macedonian has the same word for "Sunday" and "week" (nedela).


In Russian, the word седмица also exists, but only in liturgical use (Holy Week = Страстная седмица, literally Passion Week).


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## apmoy70

fdb said:


> ἕβδομος is an adjective meaning “seventh”. In Gen. 20:10 the LXX (which, of course, is not “the original”, but a translation from Hebrew) has τῇ δὲ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ ἑβδόμῃ σάββατα κυρίῳ τῷ θεῷ “on the seventh day is the Sabbath for the  Lord God”.
> 
> ἑβδομάς is a noun meaning “a group of seven”, and then “week”. The two words are obviously related, but not the same.
> 
> On the other hand, the Hebrew loan word σάββατα (plural), or σάββατον (singular) is used both for “Sabbath” and for “week”, the latter in Luke 18:12 δὶς τοῦ σαββάτου “twice a week”.


Indeed, and Sunday in the Gospel narrative of the resurrection, is «μία τῶν σαββάτων» => «καὶ λίαν πρωῒ τῇ μιᾷ τῶν σαββάτων ἔρχονται ἐπὶ τὸ μνημεῖον ἀνατείλαντος τοῦ ἡλίου» very early in the morning, on the first day of the week (lit. "on the first day of the sabbaths") they came to the tomb when the sun had risen (Mark 16:2 NKJV)


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## borna

OBrasilo said:


> Edit: And the croatian word might have originated from Kajkavian (its absence in Serbian for example, IMHO rules out Shtokavian origins), in which case we might be dealing with older _tědĭnŭ_ that became _teden_ in Slovenian and _tjeden_ in Kajkavian, then the Kajkavian form changed its ending to _-dan_ under Shtokavian influence and was borrowed into Croatian Shtokavian.


Yes, the Croatian word comes from Kajkavian where it's _teden_, it was "Shtokavianized" into _tjedan_ for the purposes of the standard language.


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