>"Ponedel'nik". Assuming 'po' means after (in Russian "posle") it still doesn't translate into after Sunday. It has week as a part of the word, e.g. po ~ after, nedel' - week, ik - just a suffix.

Right, I forgot the Russian word for Sunday is different - it's nedelja in south Slavic languages.

>>>and Sunday - "voskresen'e" again doesn't mean a number.
>>
>>It means "resurrection", literally. Though in some other Slavic languages, the word for Sunday is "nedelja" - from "ne dela" = works not.
>
>Interesting. I never thought about the etimology of nedelja (week).

No, it's nedelja as the (final) day of the week, and then the whole week was called the same. Did I tell you I dislike overloaded words? :)

>What exactly do you mean here? "Yom" means day. "Rishon" means first (one is "ahad"/"ahat" depending of the gender) Actually, numbers in Hebrew as all other words have genders (ever male or female or some words can only be used in plural, such as water, clouds, etc. - at least these words have plural ending).

Ok, so numbers have gender and can have singular or plural, I'm used to that. We even say "jedne makaze" (one scissors) where "jedne" is feminine plural of "jedan" (one).

>tesha
>eser
>
>(I'm not sure I used the correct letters to represent Hebrew sounds, because I know only few words in Hebrew and not a linguist as my husband)

And I know even less about proper transcription, but it's not important. Thank you for showing me this - so now I know that it's "day first", "day second" etc, without actual proper names for days. Which I didn't know before.

>I think it may come from religion. At least in Hebrew it does <g>

And as in all things religious, they all think they're right and everybody else is wrong, to the extent that they all have a seven day week, but couldn't agree to when does it start.

Woe is us programmers.