One thing in my study of languages that has always fascinated me is the way that different languages name days on the Western calendar, especially when they adapt it to a locality that had a different system for structuring time before its introduction. In Japanese, the days of the week correspond to the sun, moon (日Sunday and 月Monday) and then the five East Asian traditional elements (火Fire/Tuesday, 水Water/Wednesday, 木Wood/Thursday, 金Metal/Gold/Friday, and 土Earth/Saturday.) In other languages, they may use names for old astrological stars, or sometimes simple numbers.
Even within European languages the pantheons shift between Northern and Southern Europe, and possibly even more in other languages of the continent. So Sunday is the “Lord’s day”, possibly linked as much to Sol Invictus as to Christianity, Monday is the moon’s day, Tuesday is the god of war’s day, Wednesday is the all-father god’s day, etc etc… the role of the god or natural feature is similar between the two language regions, but the names and traits are subtly different.
That was, in fact, not what I had planned to write about today. I have not yet even had the time to write on my current story. Nonetheless, it seemed like an interesting topic.
On the writing front, I will probably have to satisfy myself with a few sentences at best. It is already bedtime, and I have not yet put down a single line besides this blog post.
Dictionopolis 