The English week

Some completely useless information: la setmana anglesa (ie a working week that ends at lunch on Saturday) is specified in Article 201 of the constitution (PDF) written by Josep Conangla i Fontanilles and approved by Francesc Macià’s separatists in Havana, Cuba in October 1928. This is possibly the last positive mention of British working practices in the twentieth century.

I’d be grateful if someone would tell me how the expression got into Catalan and/or Spanish, Portuguese, and (possibly) other Romance languages. I believe that the first use here was during WWI in progressive political propaganda, which suggests it may have been imported along with British notions of social reform rather than having arrived a generation or two earlier with liberalism. I’ve also heard it in Dutch and German, but am similarly clueless as to how it got there. In Dutch it tends to mean a five-day week during which one works nine-hour days without being paid overtime, but the meaning may have changed.

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