Jomo Mojo, you truly are a master linguist, or at least a good researcher. I have been lookinh for an explanation of the Irish items, but only found out that December was Christmas, and what September and October were. Thank you for helping me out there.
Thank you, Mongrel_8 and Timchik. I’m an amateur linguist, self-taught. What I posted here is from what I could find in my personal library. Just went and bought an Irish dictionary the other day. 
After posting the Irish stuff, I realized that Céadaoin for Wednesday means ‘First Aoine’ and Déardaoin for Thursday means ‘Second Aoine’. While Friday is just plain Aoine. (Like the Persian Saturday, shanbeh, which means just ‘day’?) *Aoine seems to be derived from the word aon meaning ‘one’.
*Days of the week (garakun edür).
Sunday: sayin edür (Good Day) or gesek edür or nyam garag
Monday: nige gragh (First Planet) or somiya or negdekh ödör (First Day)
Tuesday: qoyar gragh (Second Planet) or angradak or myagmar garag (Mars)
Wednesday: ghurban gragh (Third Planet) bot (Mercury) or lkhagva or guravdakhi ödör (Third Day)
Thursday: dörben gragh (Fourth Planet) or baraksavati or pürev garag (Jupiter)
Friday: tabun gragh (Fifth Planet) or söger or baasan or tavdakhi ödör (Fifth Day)
Saturday: jirghughan gragh (Sixth Planet) or bimba edür or byamba.
Months (sara).
January: nige sara (First month)
February: qoyar sara (Second month)
March: ghurban sara (Third month)
April: dörben sara (Fourth month)
May: tabun sara (Fifth month)
June: jirghughan sara (Sixth month)
July: dologhan sara (Seventh month)
August: naiman sara (Eighth month)
September: yisün sara (Ninth month)
October: arban sara (Tenth month)
November: arban nige sara (Eleventh month)
December: arban qoyar sara (Twelfth month).
Seasons (oolaril).
Spring: khabor
Summer: jun
Autumn: namor
Winter: ebül.
*Directions (juk).
North: khoido
South: emüne
East: jegün
West: baraghon.
It turns out that the maalis in Maaliskuu for March came from the word mahla meaning ‘sap’ (when the sap rises in the birch trees, tapped by the Finns), but was altered, influenced by the word maa ‘earth’, for some reason.
The huhti in Huhtikuu for April refers to clearing the forest in a slash-and-burn culture. The Lithuanian month name birZélis (June) means the same thing.
The syys in Syyskuu for September is from sysky, ‘autumn’.
The marras in Marraskuu for November means ‘death’ and is probably an old loanword from Indo-European. (cf Latin mors/mortis, Sanskrit mrtya, ‘death’.) In Finnish t often changes to s.
The joulu (Yule) in joulukuu for December is a loanword from Swedish. Yule was originally a 12-day Germanic pagan winter festival.
Because somebody had to do it:
Did the mention of “Yule” trigger your memory of the Middle-Earth calendars?
Jomo, actually “Monday, Trewsday, Hevensday…” was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread. (I am such a Tolkien geek!)
c_carol, that was an amazing bit of wordplay Tolkien pulled off in Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings. Having conceived the mythology of Arda out of whole cloth, he derived Elvish names for the days of the week based on this mythology, the Valar, the Two Trees, and all … then he figured how this ancient lore would filter down to the simple Hobbits in a much reduced form … then he produced for the Hobbits an oddly mutated form of these names in English that just happened to resemble the names we use today (which come from Germanic mythology).
“The Hobbits took over this arrangement, but the meanings of their translated names were soon forgotten, or no longer attended to, and the forms were much reduced, especially in everyday pronunciation.”
He traced an older form that looked like Middle English, and how it became the later form used at the time of the War of the Ring. I still shake my head in wonder when I look how he did this.
Elvish names of the days of the week:
Anarya (dedicated to the Sun)
Isilya (Moon)
Aldúya (The Two Trees [the original sources of light before the Sun and Moon were made])
Menelya (The Heavens)
Eärenya (The Sea)
Valanya (The Valar [the high demigods of Arda mythology])
Elenya (Stars)
So for the Hobbits these became:
Sunday
Monday
Trewsday
Hevensday → Hensday
Mersday
Highday
Sterday
"Romans replaced the names with their own gods when Constantine borrowed the idea of a week in AD 321. " So what did they do before that? Think in terms of quarter-months? Half-ides?
This is kind of like the question of what the ancient Greeks did. I suspect that there was no standard, as IIRC the different city-states had different measures for time, distance, weight, etc.
Also:
Northeast: koillinen
Northwest: luode
Southeast: kaakko
Southwest: lounas
The days of the week in Japanese are all on-yomi. The kun-yomi equivalents are as follows:
Sunday - nichi - hi
Monday - getsu - tsuki
Tuesday - ka - hi
Wednesday - sui - mizu
Thursday - moku - ki
Friday - kin - kane
Saturday - do - tsuchi
The fact that the days of the week are named after the five Chinese elements is accidental - they are named after the planets and it is the planets that are named after the elements! The seven celestial bodies are as follows:
Sun: hi (modern: taiyô)
Moon: tsuki (full moon: mangetsu - for use of the on-yomi)
Mars: kasei
Mercury: suisei
Jupiter: mokusei
Venus: kinsei
Saturn: dosei
Sei is the on-yomi for hoshi, star.
The proper way to form the words for week days is to add the suffix yôbi, sometimes shortened to simply yô. The rather complicated character yô (18 strokes) means day of the week and bi, is the same character, hi, used for Sun, but here means day, and is unusually used in the kun-yomi form in a compound.
I checked out The Teahouse of August and in Japanese, it was translated as Hachigatsu Jûgo-ya no Chaya
Hachigatsu jûgo-ya, the fifteenth night of August, which according to the lunar callendar is a night of full moon.
In Chinese, this was apparently translated simply as qiu yue cha shi autumn moon teahouse.
Oh, and Ryûkyû, hmmm
Hachigatsu: pacigwaci
Jûgo-ya: zuugu’jaa
Chaya: uh, sorry can’t find it.
If you read Japanese, though, there’s a really nice site about Ryûkyû here, though, there’s an online dictionary with recordings of the pronunciation.
Addendum, for those who care, it’s important to note that the days of the week in Japanese are not recent translations of European terms. They were imported from Tang dynasty China, probably around the seventh century - along with the concept of a seven-day week.
If I understand what you’re asking, then I think your question was answered in part a couple of posts before yours by Protesilaus, who showed that the common thread across cultures and languages are the similarities between particular deities, not astronomical associations. Certainly the Romans made the obvious association of their seven-day week with the Sun, Moon and five planets visible to the naked eye, so that all three sets – planets, gods and weekdays – had corresponding names. But the Saxons associated their gods with the Roman gods (not Saxon and Latin planet-names), and named their weekdays accordingly.
I remember that thread. One thing which came out of it was the distinction which can be made between earth (dirt, soil), Earth (the physical object, planet) and “the world” (sphere of human life & activity) in different languages. As your Swedish example demonstrates.
Jovan—amazing, utterly amazing. You not only know Japanese and Chinese, you can do Ryukyuan!!!
Do you know what the traditional Chinese names were before they were replaced by the boring numerical names?
Part of the answer is that the days are not named directly after the gods, but after the then-known ‘planets’: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. They were translated into the Saxon using the names of the gods that the Roman syncretists felt corresponded to the gods after whom the planets were named in Latin: the Sun, the Moon, Tiw, Woden, Thunorr, Frigg; except in the case of Saturn, for whom no satisfactory equivalent could be found.
You might be surprised that Woden, king of the Saxon gods, corresponded to Mercury (Hermes) rather than to Jupiter. There are three reasons. One is that Mercury guided the souls of the dead, while Woden collected the souls of the dead. Another is that Woden was a magician, while Hermes (Greek equivalent of Mercury under another set of forced correspondences) was patron of magicians, because of his equivalence (under yet another set of forced correspondences) to the Egyptian god whom the Greeks called Thoth Trimegistos. The third is that Jupiter was already taken by Thunorr, because they were both gods of thunder and storms.
I don’t know why the days were named for the planets in that peculiar order. I remember reading an explanation once, which was in terms of the intricacies of Babylonian astronomy or astrology. But I don’t remember what the explanation was. The invaluable Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages) tells me that “…the origin of the system is uncertain”.
Regards,
Agback
To be honest, I read some Chinese, and I just did a quick search on a Ryukyuan dictionary - ain’t the internet grand, though?
Unfortunately, my dictionaries are at home, and I doubt anyway that any of them gives Tang-era pronunciations. That being said, it appears the names of the week were written exactly the same way they are now in Japanese.
The internet yields more trivia: the first systematic use of the seven-day week in Japan is found in the diary of Michinaga Fujiwara (998 - 1021). When the Tokugawa clan took power, Thursday and Sunday were interverted, according to mistaken Kanto-area usage. This was corrected some 80 years later, in 1685.
The first mention of the seven-day week in Chinese litterature dates from the late 8th century and is found in the Kong que ming wang jing a translation by one Yijing of a Buddhist sutra, the Mahâmâyûrî-vidyârâjñî, or Peacock Sutra. That being said, it is believed that through Persian Manicheist influences, the week had already been introduced in China by that date.
The first mention in Japan dates from 806, in the Shukuyôkyô, another Buddhist sutra brought back from China by the great monk Kôbô Daishi (Kûkai). Note - the Shukuyôkyô nowadays seems to be widely used by fortune-tellers for divination purposes…
Kôbô Daishi—the author of the iroha poem. A man of many talents.
Here’s a puzzle, if anyone knows the answer: what is the etymology of the French name for Saturday, samedi? How do you get that from Saturni dies? There’s nothing in it that could produce an m.
The Italian name for Saturday is sabato and the Spanish is sabado. My guess is that the b in Sabbath blended with the n in Saturn to result in the m of samedi. Maybe the French had been using both names and they just sort of merged.
Oh, oh, I know!
The reason it’s samedi is because it doesn’t come from Saturni dies like many sources claim, but rather the vulgar latin Sambati dies, Sabbath day. The romanian sambata has the same etymology.
[OT] How much can you pack in a lifetime?
Kôbô Daishi,
-Founded the Shingon sect, one of the major Buddhist movements in Japan.
-Invented katakana.
-Introduced the 7-day week in Japan.
-Supposedly introduced ancient Greek-style homosexuality to Japan.
… among other things.