Chinese days of the week
Sunday: xing qi ri (Week’s Day–xing qi ‘week’ is written with the characters for ‘star’ and ‘period of time’; ri means both ‘sun’ and ‘day’)
Monday: xing qi yi (Week’s First)
Tuesday: xing qi er (Week’s Second)
Wednesday: xing qi san (Week’s Third)
Thursday: xing qi si (Week’s Fourth)
Friday: xing qi wu (Week’s Fifth)
Saturday: xing qi liu (Week’s Sixth)
Another country that thinks the week stars on Monday!
*Tamil days of the week
Sunday: ñâyirruk kilamai (Sun-Day)
Monday: tinkaT kilamai (Moon-Day)
Tuesday: cevvâyk kilamai (Mars-Day)
Wednesday: putan kilamai (Mercury-Day: uses the name budha borrowed from Sanskrit)
Thursday: viyâlak kilamai (Jupiter-Day)
Friday: veLLik kilamai (Venus-Day)
Saturday: canik kilamai (Saturn-Day: uses the name Sani borrowed from Sanskrit).
Hungarian days of the week
Sunday: vasárnap (Market Day; vasár ‘market’ is borrowed from Persian bâzâr, as is Turkish pazar)
Monday: hétfõ (Head of the Week; hét, like Persian hafteh, means both ‘seven’ and ‘week’; fõ means ‘head’ so the Hungarians too must think the week starts with Monday)
Tuesday: kedd (related to kettõ ‘two’?)
Wednesday: szerda
Thursday: csütörtök
Friday: péntek
Saturday: szombat (Sabbath)
I have no way to explain the Hungarian names for Tuesday through Friday. Any Hungarians here can help us out with the etymology?
*According to The Hungarian Language, ed. by L. Benkõ & S. Imre, hét was a loanword from Old Iranian, which explains its similarity to the Persian word.
Jomo:
You’re a night owl too? Hell, I guess it gets boring around midnight everywhere, what with all of those wussies going to sleep and nothing but the worst of the worst on TV. 
Putting up the days of the week in various languages is as good a thing to do as any. I actually copied down the Persian days of the week. Why? Who knows. I don’t have any plans to visit Iran. Anyway, I would like to know where you get your info. Trying to recite the days of the week in Urdu or some other obscure language might be just the trick for those long nights. Please don’t tell me you’re reciting from memory. 
Let’s go in alphabetical order, starting with…
Basque
Sunday: igande No idea of the meaning.
Monday: astelehen (lit: “first of the week”)
Tuesday: astearte (lit: “middle of the week”)
Wednesday: asteazken (lit: “end of the week”)
Thursday: ostegun Not sure of the meaning, but possibly related to the suffix -oste, meaning “after” - so “after (the end of the week)”?
Friday: ostiral or bariku No idea here.
Saturday: larunbat Again, no idea, though there is the word laru, meaning “yellow”. Yellow day? Nah, probably not.
So not only does the week begin on Monday, but it ends on Wednesday. It may be that the original, pre-Roman Basque week was only three or four days long and they tacked on three more when the Romans showed up with their seven-day week.
Esperanto
Sunday: dimancxo
Monday: lundo
Tuesday: mardo
Wednesday: merkredo
Thursday: jxaudo
Friday: vendredo
Saturday: sabato
Yeah, a straight lift from the Roman-influenced days of the week. But since we’re doing any languages we know/can think of, it ought to be included.
Greek
Sunday: Kuriaki - the Lord’s day.
Monday: Deutera - the second day.
Tuesday: Triti - the third day.
Wednesday: Tetarti - the fourth day.
Thursday: Pempti - the fifth day.
Friday: Paraskeui - related to the word meaning “prepare”, most likely for
Saturday: Sabbato - the Sabbath.
Interesting! In Greece, the Sabbath (and seventh day) is not the Lord’s day.
Jomo Mojo sed:
I am just guessing, but those days sound like possible Indo-European loans to me, probably Slavic. Compare them to Polish:
Wednesday: szerda (ser-da) / sroda (shro-da)
Thursday: csütörtök (chy-tör-tök) / wtorek (ftor-ek) <== also consider cztery (ch-ter-i) == 4
Friday: péntek (pen-tek) / piatek (pjon-tek)
-m
m! Good call!
You’re exactly right. Hungarian has picked up a great many loanwords from Slavic. Loránd Benkõ in The Hungarian Language confirms your guess: he lists szerda and csütörtök among the Slavonic loanwords in Hungarian. As for Polish piatek, does the a have a hook under it? That would make it nasal accounting for the n in péntek. (Polish has conserved the Old Slavonic nasal vowels more than other modern Slavic languages.)
This would corroborate my guess that kedd for Tuesday is related to the Magyar word for ‘two’. Just think, if English speakers started the week on Monday, we could follow it with “Twosday.”
Does anybody remember Harlan Ellison’s story “Shatterday”? He reinvented all the days of the week with Joycean wordplay. The title of the story is a chilling example.
Not to hijack too much, but has it occured to anyone else that humanity isn’t all that clever when it comes to naming days of the week? I mean, “Day One” or “Day Two”? I mean, you’d think we could come up with more exciting names.
And this from Captain Amazing.
Jomo Mojo asked:
Yup, the a is a nasalized a with a “hook” – that’s what I attempted to indicate with the pseudo-phonetic “piatek (pjon-tek)”. (In Polish, a nasalized a sounds more like an o. Yes, linguists and native speakers, that is a simplification.) Alas, I can’t figure out how to post to this board in IPA (the international phonetic alphabet).
-m
Well, a whole lot of cultures/countries named their days after various deities, but the advent of Christianty and Communism “cured” a lot of places of such ancient veneration. I know in Iceland, at least, Christianity heralded the renaming of the weekdays as “day one” “day two” etc…
Since I can, here’s the days of the week in a Romance language I have been working on called Montreiano:
Luns
Marts
Mèrcóus
Ioues
Vèrns
Sauáo
Domiño
Note: ñ is pronounced as “ng”, not “ny” as in Spanish (though the two are closely related)
And in Swedish Saturday is lördag, a derivation of an older word lögerdag, meaning the day to take a bath.
(Just thought I’d mention it)
Hey Jomo!
I already explained the Hungarian thing like a gazillion posts back! Trying to steal my credit?
Anyhow, “kedd” as deriving from the Hungarian word for “two” - “ket” (accent acute over the “e”) seems like a logical enough guess. I never had thought of that.
I just wanted to pop back in a say how cool a topic this is. Now I am curious about what monthes, seasons, directions, etc. would be in other languages. Thank you for helping to cultivate my interest.
Does anybody know when Japan adopted a Western-style seven-day week? I know they adopted the Gregorian calendar not long after the Meiji restoration (1868), but I’m wondering if the week predates that. Anyway, the days have interesting names (each ends in yohbi, or “day”)
Sunday - Nichi (Sun)
Monday - Getsu (Moon)
Tuesday - Ka (Fire)
Wednesday - Sui (Water)
Thursday - Moku (Tree)
Friday - Kin (Gold)
Saturday - Do (Earth).
The months are just First Month, Second Month, etc.
Very dull.
OK. Let’s start with Swedish
Days of the week
Söndag
Måndag
Tisdag
Onsdag
Torsdag
Fredag
Lördag
Months (not much different from English though)
Januari
Februari
Mars
April
Maj
Juni
Juli
Augusti
September
Oktober
November
December
Seasons (I think you can work it out which is which)
Vår
Sommar
Höst
Vinter
Directions
Nord (or Norr)
Söder
Öster
Väster
BTW I once read something somewhere on Straight Dope where someone asked if the Earth was called Earth in other languages too. I don’t remember who answered it but he/she/it demonstrated that it wasn’t so by entering the word earth into some automated translator. The translation into Swedish came out as mull, which is nothing but the common or garden variety (and it’s very rarely used, I don’t think I have ever heard it other than in funeral services). The planet is called Jorden.
Well, we’ve done the polish days, so let’s do the months and directions:
styczen --jan
luty --feb
marzec – march
kwiecien – april
maj --may
czerwiec – june
lipiec --july
sierpien – august
wrzesien – september
pazdiernik – october
listopad --november
grudzien – december
i’m not sure what most of these mean. february might come from “lod” meaning ice, but that’s just my guess, and I’m not too convinced it’s right. My WAG is that “lipiec” comes from “lipa” meaning “linden.” “Listopad” definitely means something like “falling of the leaves.”
It is interesting to note that Croatian also has a month called “Listopad,” but it’s October. Funny that. One would expect the leave falling month to be earlier in the more northerly country. I believe Czech also uses descriptive names for months. Oh, and “kwiecien” comes from “kwiat” meaning either “flower” or “bloom.”
north – polnoc – “midnight”
east – wschod – “rise (of the sun)”
south – poludnie – “noon”
west – zachod – “set (of the sun)”
pretty straightforward.
spring – wiosna
summer – lato
fall – jesien
winter – zima
No idea where these come from. The word for “cold” is “zimno,” which bears resemblence to “zima”
*pulykamell (Turkey Breast), sajnálom, barát! I overlooked that you were first with the Magyar. Rosszom (my bad).
As for Hindustani days of the week:
I made a mistake — itvâr for Sunday does not mean ‘Lord’s Day’; it comes from Sanskrit aditya ‘Sun’ + -vâr. In Sanskrit, ravi and aditya are two words for the Sun, in addition to the usual sûrya.
So Urdu has kept the old planetary names for Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. It replaced Monday with a Persian name, Friday with an Arabic name, and Thursday with an Arabic-Hindustani compound. For Saturday, some Urdu speakers use the planetary name sanîcar, and some use the Persian word haftah meaning ‘seven’ or ‘week’. Why in heaven’s name they use the Persian word pîr (‘old man’) for Monday, I have no idea. Is it the Old Man in the Moon? kaun jântâ hai?
xtnjohnson, dômo arigatô gozaimasu — I had looked up the Japanese names but didn’t know how to explain them. This is perhaps the most interesting set of meanings yet. The Sun and Moon matching the other systems (probably via Buddhism from India, originally Babylonian), plus the five elements of Chinese cosmology: Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, Earth. The Japanese use “Gold” to stand for Metal. Nice. So I guess the traditional Chinese names must have followed this pattern, and the modern numerical names are a Red Chinese reform? I gotta ask my acupuncturist about this! I noticed that sui for ‘Water’ is a Chinese on kanji word; aren’t these all on Chinese words in Japanese?
I am certain that the Lithuanian numerical names must have been a replacement for their original mythological names. Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe — they didn’t go Christian until the fourteenth century. A few very ancient Lithuanian folksongs survive, using the Sun, Moon, and other cosmic symbols to preserve the metaphysical wisdom of the ancient sages from being lost. They knew that folksongs are more likely to endure than any other form of cultural transmission. I wonder what the original Lithuanian names were? It would afford a glimpse into a deep level of Indo-European prehistory.
What were the pre-Christian names in Greek? The same planetary pattern as the Babylonians’, I would venture. Are there any Koine Greek days of the week mentioned in the Septuagint or the New Testament? Any Bible scholars here?