Did you know the French days of the week..

[Ghostpost]

Are named after the planets and moon? Lundi (Luna, moon)
Mardi (Mars)
Mercredi (Mercury)
Jeudi (Jupiter)
Vendredi (Venus)
Samedi (Saturn)
Dimanche is the only one that isn’t. It’s the day of the lord.

If any of your children have Oxford Reading Tree as their reading scheme at primary school, they may have read this book.

Norway is interesting

mandag
tirsdag
onsdag
torsdag
fredag
lordag
sondag

So Saturday is the Lord's day.

It's fascinating to see the similarities between languages and where words come from.

So Saturday is the Lord's day

Actually - forget that. Apparently it means 'washing and cleaning'

Three of our days are named after Goddesses
Eh? No they’re not. The Norse god Freya is the only female. The sun and moon are just objects, Tyr, Woden and Thor are male Norse gods, and Saturn is a Roman male god.

Tungsten has the chemical symbol W.

It's from the German word wolframite (tin eater) which is the name given to its ore (which interferes with tin smelting).

Just for shits and giggles, the name tungsten comes from Swedish meaning heavy stone.

Nope. No idea.

I think the order would be gods, days of the week, planets. Lots of the planets aren’t visible to the naked eye (eg Saturn discovered 1610 and at that point Galileo couldn’t make out the rings).

Uniform time across a country/time zone only really started to matter once there were trains as people needed to know when to catch them. If you look at sunrise/sunset times for Bristol & Norwich you can see the difference.

I didn't know this either. But then my school was crap. The only one I remember is Athena, Goddess of Posters

Wow - this is really interesting.

Can I also ask: why are there seven days in a week, across all geographies? I presume it is like that now for ease & consistency, but where did the seven days idea first come from? I know it is in the Old Testament, when the world began, but what about civilisations who didn't have the Old Testament?

Can I also ask: why are there seven days in a week, across all geographies

That's an interesting question. I wonder if it was always so...

Or who decided the idea of a week in the first place?

I know that the Babylonians used a Base 60 counting system - which has links to why we have 360 degrees in a circle, 180 degrees in a triangle, 24 hours in a day, 60 seconds in a minute and 60 seconds in an hour.

I think the French tried to implement a base 10 system - 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour

io9.gizmodo.com/the-short-strange-history-of-decimal-time-5886129

I didn’t know any of this. Thanks for posting

I knew that but had forgotten that I had known it!
It must have been at the deepest,darkest bit of my brain where information I don't need very often goes!

german, donnerstagg, thursday, is thunder day

www.fluentin3months.com/german-days-of-the-week/

And Thor is the God of thunder.

I was about to ask why the Norwegians have their months named after Roman Gods and leaders?
januar
februar
mars
april
mai
juni
juli
August
september
oktober
november
desember

But it seems those Romans influenced Norwegian language as well.

Bloody Romans, what did they ever do for us?

The Portuguese do things a bit differently
Segunda-feira - second market day or Monday
Terça-feira - third market day or Tuesday
Quarta-feira - fourth market day or Wednesday
Quinta-feira - fifth market day or Thursday
Sexta-feira - sixth market day or Friday
Sábado - Saturday
Domingo - Sunday

Is Sunday the first market day?

Yes but just to confuse you they don't call it that. Also they shorten the names so they refer to Tuesday as the 3rd

I think the cycles of the moon are why we have 7 days a week.
Which makes sense.

It must have been fascinating in the old days to observe all this stuff and then realise how the moon changed, the sun's position changed during the year and how it all repeated itself. And then to decide on what a day, week, month and year should be.

Do you think they held a conference to discuss it all?

I love all this stuff!

In Japanese, the days translate as follows:

Sunday = Sun Day
Monday = Moon Day
Tuesday = Fire Day
Wednesday = Water Day
Thursday = Wood Day
Friday = Gold Day
Saturday = Earth Day

I'm always a bit fascinated by the similarity between our Sunday and Monday and theirs!

It's interesting stuff.

Thursday is Thor's Day. Donnerstag is Donner's Day, Donner was equivalent to Thor. Jeudi, Jupiter's Day, also falls in line as Jupiter was lined up as an equivalent to Thor in the early middle ages.

Tuesday - Tyr was a god of war, as was Mars of Mardi.

The people who wrote down the names of the week in Western Europe didn't seem to have much variety of ideas.

btw I think we have Wotan's Day rather than Odin's Day on Wednesday as the days of the week had been stabilised more or less before the Viking invasions (Wotan was the Anglo Saxon verson of Norse Odin) but perhaps someone more knowing could comment on whether it was Thor or Thunor for Thursday.

And why, when we had a French legal system to the ?15th century, we kept the Anglo Saxon days of the week?

Do you think they held a conference to discuss it all?

I’m imagining all the different kingdoms getting together like in Lord of the Rings or Games of Thrones and deciding on it ..

The Japanese one is interesting! I wonder what Chinese, Sanskrit and Arabic
Days of the week are..these must derive from somewhere too. Would be interesting to see if they’re similar to ours aswell.

@LizziesTwin

Saturn (the planet) is observable to the naked eye and was known to the ancient Greeks. Galileo used his telescope in 1610 to see the rings for the first time.

Spanish follows the same rules as French (unsurprising as they're so similar)

Lunes/Lundi
Martes/Mardi
Miércoles/Mercredi
Jueves/Jeudi
Viernes/Vendredi
Sábado/Samedi
Domingo/Dimanche

I wonder where Domingo/Dimanche comes from?

Really interesting, I’ve never really thought about it or maybe it’s one of those long forgotten things taught in school (long time ago for me)