So in Japanese, the first two days of the week are called Nichiyobi and Getsuyobi. Literally translated, these names mean “Sun Day” and “Moon Day.”
I just figured they got that from the west - though interestingly the rest of the names of their days have nothing to do with ours. For the curious, the names of the other days are “fire,” “water,” “wood,” “gold,” and “earth.”
But then I started wondering - where does the seven day week come from? At first I thought we just got it from judaism through christianity, but don’t I recall that the Romans also had a seven day week? And if the seven days had come through christianity from judaism, why would they have such “pagan names” derived from natural and non-christian mythological sources?
And did the Japanese adopt our seven-day week, or did they get it from somewhere else untraceable to the west? If so, then is it just a coincidence that they call their first two days by the “same” name as we call ours?
There isn’t, by any chance, a correspondence between the elements named in their other days and the gods our days are named after, is there?
Sorry, my post is kind of “english-centric” so I forgot to take into account the names of the days in the Romance languages.
In English, the days are named after
The Sun
The Moon
Thiw (sp?)
Odin
Thor
Frigg
Saturn
So the first two are natural entities, the next four are norse gods, and the last is either a roman god or one of the planets.
My question is, is this seven day week descended from the roman system, or the jewish system?@In either case, why are natural and norse names used instead of roman names or christian names or jewish names? And also in either case, are the two systems (jewish and roman) related or were their seven day weeks arrived at independantly?
And lastly, where did Japan and other cultures get their seven day week? And are their day-names in any way related to the “western” day-name traditions?
My understanding is that most English names of the days of the week are from the Germanic tongues. They’re the names of gods from the Norse myth cycle. Specifically Tuesday (for Tiw, or Tyr); Wednesday (for Woden or Odin); Thursday (for Thor); and Friday (for Frey).
My question was not “where do the names come from” but rather, why those names and not roman or jewish names? And why seven days? And is there any relationship between our day-names and those of other seven-day-week cultures, for example, the Japanese, who do share “sun” day and “moon” day with us but who seem to have completely different names for the rest of the days.
Are these questions clear to everyone or should I just start over and try again?
They are all planets. Since planets were mythologized, they are also names of deities.
As for Japanese Nichiyobi and Getsuyobi: these are translations of Sanskrit ravivâra (‘Sun-day’) and somavâra (‘Moon-day’), respectively. This Indian & Sanskrit influence came to Japan via Buddhism. The remaining five days are the Chinese five elements, important to Confucian and Taoist cosmology, and used in countries influenced by Confucianism, like Japan.
In Sanskrit, all seven days of the week follow the same planetary pattern, in the same order, as in European languages.
As to why ancient cultures from India to Germany had seven days in the week and named them after planets, that goes back to ancient Babylonian astrologers, the first people in the world to make a systematic study of planetary motions and build a calendar therefrom. The Hindus in India as well as the ancient Romans picked up the days of the week and the Zodiac signs from the Chaldean astrologers.
I couldn’t find the thread wherein we explained how the ordering occurred–if you take the seven heavenly bodies (sun, moon, and five planets) and order them according to how long it takes them to progress against the “fixed” star background, it would be Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon.
Dang. Not the same as the days of the week. O well.
Now, assign each planet to an hour of the day, repeating the seven names over and over. The first hour of the first day will be Saturn’s. The first hour of the second day will be the Sun’s. And so on. That’s how the names of the planets were assigned to the days of the week. Our English names are Norse gods corresponding to the Roman gods.
The Babylonians seem to have been the first to name days of the week after planets/gods around 700 BC. The Romans replaced the names with their own gods when Constantine borrowed the idea of a week in AD 321. The idea of a week didn’t make it to Britain until the time of the Anglo-Saxon conquests, who took up some old Roman customs but kept their own religion and gods, hence the changes to the Norse gods in the English day names.
Planet Ancient Planet-gods Day Name
Babylonian Roman Anglo-Saxon (English)
Sun Shamash Sol Sun Sunday
Moon Sin Luna Moon Monday
Mars Nergal Mars Tiw Tuesday
Mercury Nabu Mercurius Woden Wednesday
Jupiter Marduk Jupiter Thor Thursday
Venus Ishtar Venus Freya Friday
Saturn Ninurta Saturnus Saturn Saturday
Source of Chart: Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year, by David Ewing Duncan (p. 56)
A lunar cycle with respect to the sun is 29.53 days, but the moon goes through the Zodiac in about 28 days.
In the time it takes the moon to get 360 degrees around the Zodiac, the sun has also gone about 30 degrees; the extra day and a half until the moon reaches conjunction with the sun is the difference.
I left Japan 8 years ago, and I’ve forgotten most of the language that I knew. But here in Korea they use the same Chinese characters to represent the days.
Sunday = sun
Monday = moon
Tuesday = fire
Wednesday = water
Thursday = wood (or tree)
Friday = gold (or metal)
Saturday = dirt
I don’t know how to post Chinese characters. I have enough trouble with smilies.
The 28 days is related to the menstrual cycle. The first calenders were probably menstrual calendars. When men took things over, they switched it to the moon’s cycle (and made the number 13 unlucky, since 28 x 13 is 364).
I agree about the 28 day part. There aren’t too many factors that go into 28. Seven is one of them, and that works out very conveniently, because it lets you have four very identifiable quarters – Full Moon, Half Moon (first Quarter), New Moon, other Half Moon (last Quarter). Dividing further isn’t so easy to do in any case, and when you consider that the time perios would include fractional days it’s clear why they didn’t do it.
Please note that 14 goes into 28 twice, and there IS a period of 14 days, which we don’t use much anymore – the Fortnight. I suspect that the Fortnight wasn’t a convenient measure of time – too long for week-like things and too short for longer term things. Besides, it was as easy to say “two weeks” as “one fortnight”.
There could conceivably have been three periods of ten days to fit the “solar” month, but I suspect that, having no convenient “quarters”, it would have fallen out of favor pretty fast.
OK, Cecil is just reasonable about it. A combination of things, he says.
Some Babylonian measures the number of days between quarter moon and full, and counts the number of planets in the sky–fudging things a bit–and the twilight zone theme goes off in their head. This has got to be important. Probably lucky too.
