Weeks

I was going to write about the self-styled fascism experts who have started crawling out of the woodwork again, but there's no way I can even maintain the necessary interest in them to produce a couple of paragraphs. Here's something that is interesting.

Sunday              Sonntag            Domingo         duminică

Monday             Montag             Lunes              luni

Tuesday             Dienstag           Martes             marţi

Wednesday        Mittwoch          Miércoles        miercuri

Thursday           Donnerstag       Jueves              joi

Friday                Freitag              Viernes            vineri

Saturday            Samstag            Sábado            sâmbătă      

So that's the days of the week in four columns. The first two are from Germanic languages (English and German). The third and fourth are from Romantic languages (Spanish and Romanian.) Patterns largely hold across those subfamilies.

In English most names for weekdays are taken from Norse gods: Tuesday from Tyr/Tiw (war); Wednesday from Odin/Wotan (supreme god); Thursday from Thor (thunder); and Friday from Freya (love). German does the same mostly, although they dethrone Odin and just call Wednesday "midweek." 

Romance languages―and this would hold for French, Italian, etc.―substitute equivalent Roman gods, at least in theory. This is pretty straightforward for Tuesday and Friday. But Jupiter/Jove is honored on Thursday instead of Wednesday even though he's the supreme Roman god. Presumably the thunder connection has something to do with it. And Wednesday goes to the messenger/commerce/trickery god Mercury. On the surface very different from Odin.

Just a curious matter, that's all.