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I’m a beginner learning French and I noticed two words in my lesson: football and week‑end. I have a few related questions and would appreciate simple explanations and examples.

Are these words borrowed from English?

Why is there a hyphen in week‑end? In English it’s usually written weekend (one word).

I understand the sports of football came from England, so they use the English word 'football.' But the concept of 'weekend' may have existed from a long time ago, so there might be a native French word meaning weekend. Why use week‑end instead of a native French phrase?

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    Note that fin de semaine can be used to mean weekend in Québec French but not that much in France where it generally means a vague period of time that includes Friday and around. See french.stackexchange.com/a/2118/1109 Commented 2 days ago

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Football and week-end are, indeed, borrowed from English. For the spelling of week-end with or without a hyphen, both were in use in English, as well as a version in two words (as is often the case with newer compounds). When French borrowed it at the beginning of the 20th century, the hyphenated version was still dominant in English, so it's no surprise French would have borrowed the word with that particular spelling N-Gram of weekend, week-end and week end in the whole English corpus

The unhyphenated "weekend" is hardly unknown in casual French usage however, in no small part because of the influence of contemporary English.

As for the meaning, a 5-day work week with days reserved for leisure and recreation is a modern invention. There was no more an established word for it in English as there was in French, and like all new technologies and cultural phenomenon, the word of the innovator or of those who helped its spread was borrowed alongside the concept itself. Weekend is in that respect similar to tea, wine, umami, opera or orange, a modern wanderwort.

In premodern societies, the division of time between rest and labour was mostly dictated by religious calendars and the need to participate in ritual, or the necessities of weather, climate and the inclination of the planet at a given latitude (and thus daylight).

Industrialisation and its increase in productivity was achieved in part through the elimination of rest through contract law, secularisation and electrical lighting. This in turn led to revendications by workers for a span of time set aside for rest by extending the Sunday break, and once achieved, the invention of new forms of recreation to fill that time of rest. A weekend is something very new.

Modern uses of the term "week-end" date to the 1870's in English. The TLFi dates the first use of the term in French to 1926. A six-day workweek remained the norm in industrialised societies until the 1930's where the 40h workweek starts to spread, sometimes only for some industries or trade, sometimes for all workers. In France, it was decided by the Popular Front government under Léon Blum in 1936 and was progressively applied to different trades. In Belgium, it was only put into law in 1964 (5x9 hours!).

I hope this demonstrates how recent the very idea of a weekend is, and how much more recent the reality of it can be. In this context, that we use a loanword for it is no surprise: it's not much older than the internet or inline skates, and contemporary with nightclubs and briefs, to cite some other concepts with names borrowed from English in French (internet, des rollers, les dancings and les slips) and much younger than football is.

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  • Although I've been able to find the definition online, "revendications" is not a word I have ever heard in English. I suspect it of being a "faux ami", and that you intended a much more common word like "demands". Commented 15 hours ago
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To round out the other question posed about "football":

Yes, "football" is also a an English loanword. The sport or game of hitting a ball in some way with your feet is nothing new, but the modern way of playing and its rules were invented in the first half of the 19th century in the British Isles, and exported internationally, including to France, in the second half of the same century.

Similarly to the concept of a weekend, the modern concept of football is a less than 2 centuries old addition to the French language.

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  • The term soccer is an abbreviation of the football game played under the rules of the Football Association to distinguish it from the game played under the rules of Rugby Football. So the usage of the word soccer by the Quebecois has nothing to do with the non-existence of codified football rules when their ancestors left for the New World. The term soccer only appeared in the 1880s specifically to distinguish two differently codified rules of the game en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football Commented yesterday
  • @user2705196 fair enough, i'll remove that part. my rationale was that because the word is new, the quebecois and the french were already separated when both "chose" which word to use to call association football. Commented yesterday

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