The seven-day week
English Monday and
Spanish lunes are not cognates and neither
are any of the other days of the week, but they are in a way equivalent since
they both descend from analogous phrases that meant ‘day of the Moon’. English Monday, for example, is derived from the
word Moon and Spanish lunes is derived from the word luna, also meaning ‘moon’ in Latin.
The story of the names of the days of the week in English and
Spanish is quite interesting and shows similarities between two systems that were
obviously related, even if we are not strictly speaking dealing with cognates. For
the most part, in English and Spanish, the names of the days of the week are derived
from the names of pre-Christian deities in the Roman world and, in the case of
English, also partially of the Anglo-Saxon worlds.
Originally, the Romans had had an 8-day week centered around
market/rest days known as nūndinae
(Eng. nundines), which they inherited
from the Etruscans.[1]
However, between the first and the third centuries of the Empire, they replaced
it with a 7-day-week calendar derived from the calendars of Babylonian and Assyrian
astrology, in which the seven days were named after heavenly bodies. In other
words, the Roman names for the days of the week that Romance languages
inherited were not the original ones the Romans used, but the ones they gradually
adopted after the first century CE. The seven-day system was officially adopted
by emperor Constantine (321 CE), by which time the old system was no longer in
use.
Dividing time into periods of 7 or 8 days was a rather
arbitrary matter for which there was no particular good reason. The ancients
reckoned time by lunar calendars and a lunar month has roughly 29.5 days which
is almost divisible by 7 (7x4=28), and that may have played a role. Also, the
number 7 was held in special high regard in the ancient world, since it was
thought to be special and to have magical properties. For instance, there were
thought to be seven planets, the classical
planets. By planet the ancients meant luminous body in the sky that was not
fixed, that moved. This included the Moon and the Sun, of course, which are not
today considered planets.
The seven-day cycle for the week has its roots in the
Ancient Near East. It is found in the Jewish Bible, for example, but it is no
doubt older than that. The seven-day week was used by the ancient Babylonians,
Persians, Greeks, and it was even adopted later by India and China as well.
The names of the days of the week in the Greek and Roman traditions
The Greeks assigned names to the days based on the
seven classical planets—the sun, the moon, and the five planets
visible to the naked eye—named after seven of their gods.[2]
Romans calqued the Greek system, including the names for the days of the week.
In other words, they did not borrow the words themselves but copied and adapted—that is, they made literal or
quasi-literal translations—of
the naming system (cf. Part I, Chapter 1,
§1.4.2).
The following are the names of the days of the week in Greek and their Latin calques
(loan translations):
Greek name
|
Transliteration
|
Latin name
|
Translation
|
ἡμέρᾱ Ἡλίου
|
hēmérā Hēlíou
|
diēs Sōlis
|
‘day of the Sun’
|
ἡμέρᾱ Σελήνης
|
hēmérā Selḗnēs
|
diēs Lūnae
|
‘day of the
Moon’
|
ἡμέρᾱ Ἄρεως
|
hēmérā Áreōs
|
diēs Martis
|
‘day of Mars’
|
ἡμέρᾱ Ἑρμοῦ
|
hēmérā Hermoû
|
diēs Mercuriī
|
‘day o Mercury’
|
ἡμέρᾱ Διός
|
hēmérā Diós
|
diēs Iōvis
|
‘day of Jupiter’
|
ἡμέρᾱ Ἀφροδῑ́της
|
hēmérā Aphrodī́tēs
|
diēs Veneris
|
‘day of Venus’
|
ἡμέρᾱ Κρόνου
|
hēmérā Krónou
|
diēs Saturnī
|
‘day of Saturn’
|
The names of the days of the week in other Romance
languages have the same source as the traditional Latin ones, but for the names
for Saturday and Sunday, which come from Church Latin in the Christian
tradition, as we shall see. The names for the days in Portuguese are different
because they stem from the Ecclesiastical (Church) tradition.[3]
The names of the days of the week in English started
off as calques of the Latin names. The ancestor of the English language (and of
the other Germanic languages) on the European continent calqued and adopted the
Latin names, which is why there are so many similarities which we can still
tell. Below you can see the names of the days in Old English and their meaning.
Modern English
|
Old English
|
Meaning
|
Sunday
|
Sunnandæg
|
‘Sun’s day’
|
Monday
|
Mōnandæg
|
‘Moon’s day’
|
Tuesday
|
Tīwesdæg
|
‘Tiw’s day’
|
Wednesday
|
Wōdnesdæg
|
‘Wodan’s (Odin’s) day’
|
Thursday
|
Þūnresdæg
|
‘Þunor’s (Thor’s) day’
|
Friday
|
Frīgedæg
|
‘Frige’s day’
|
Saturday
|
Sæternesdæg
|
‘Saturn’s day’
|
We recognize in some of the English names of the week
the names of planets and other celestial bodies (Moon, Mars, etc.). Others
contain the names of Germanic gods that were thought to be equivalent to Roman
gods. Because of common Proto-Indo-European descent and because of close contact
during the first 500 years of our era, there are strong similarities between the
pantheons of Roman, Greek, and Germanic mythologies.
We will look at the source of the names for the days of the
week in turn. All but the last two come from the names they had in Latin but, as
we can see, the first part of the name (diēs)
has been dropped, though it was optional for a while in Old Spanish. We will start
with the day for Tuesday, and then proceed to discuss Monday, which requires further
elaboration. But first, we will take a look at the word for ‘day’ in Spanish
and its source, which is at the bottom of some interesting cognates.
A note on capitalization
You will have no doubt noticed that the names of the days of
the week are not capitalized in Spanish, whereas they are capitalized in
English. The same thing applies to the names of the months of the year, which
are capitalized in English but not in Spanish. This is a mere orthographic
convention that differs from English to Spanish. It would seem that English has
chosen to treat these nouns as proper nouns, which are always capitalized in
both English and Spanish. Spanish, on the other hand, has chosen to treat them
as common nouns, which are not capitalized in either language. Remember,
however, that in English, common nouns, as well as adjectives, are capitalized
if they are derived from a proper noun, e.g. Christian (< Christ), Bostonian (< Boston), etc., which is not the case in Spanish, e.g. cristiano (< Cristo), bostoniano (<
Boston), etc.
Another noticeable area in which capitalization differs in
English and Spanish has to do with the names of languages, which are always
capitalized in English but not capitalized in Spanish. It would seem that the
rationale for not capitalizing names of languages in Spanish is related to the
convention not to capitalize adjectives. In Spanish, adjectives are never
capitalized, whereas in English they are capitalized only if they are derived
from proper nouns. Since the names of languages are almost always derived from
adjectives, e.g. inglés, español, francés, etc, it makes sense for them not to be capitalized in
Spanish. On the other hand, names of languages that are not derived from
adjectives, such as euskera or esperanto are also not capitalized in
Spanish
For more
information on the use of capital letters in Spanish, see chapter 4 of Ortografía de la lengua española (2010),
by Real Academia Española y Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. The
chapter is titled El uso de las letras mayúsculas
y minúsculas.[i]
[GO TO PART 2]
[GO TO PART 2]
[1] They were so called because the nundine came
every ninth day, counting the previous nundine, which is how the Romans reckoned
time periods, since the word nūndinae
is derived from nōnus ‘ninth’ and diēs ‘day’.
[2] The word planet did not mean
then what it means now. For the ancients, the planets were the luminous objects
in the sky that were not fixed. The word planet
(Sp. planeta) comes Greek πλανήτης (planētēs) what meant ‘wanderer, that wonders.
It was actually short for ἀστέρες πλανῆται(asteres
planetai) ‘wandering stars’, star-like objects that moved across the ‘celestial
sphere’ relative to the fixed stars.
[3] As for why the names of the days of the week
are different in Portuguese, it has to do with a very influential 6th century
bishop known as Martin of Braga (in Latin, Martinus Bracarensis, and in
Portuguese Martinho de Braga). In his effort to convert the Germanic Suevi in
his region from their Arian Christian faith to the Catholic Christian one, he
proposed changing the names of the days of the week from the names of pagan
gods to the religious names given in the fourth century to the days of Easter
week. Only the names of the days that had pagan origins were changed, with
Saturday and Sunday remaining as sábado
and domingo (as in Spanish). The rest
were changed to segunda-feira
(Monday), terça-feira (Tuesday), quarta-feira (Wednesday), quinta-feira (Thursday), and sexta-feira (Friday). The word feira comes from Lat. fēria (a back formation of the plural
noun fēriae), which meant ‘day of
rest due to a festivity, festival, holiday’. This noun is cognate with Sp. feria and Eng. fair.
[i] Cf. http://www.rae.es/obras-academicas/ortografia/ortografia-2010.
A bit dated information on capitalization can be found in the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2005)
available online: http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp
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