The Days of the Week
Hello, everyone!
As you may have guessed from the title, today I want to tell you about the days of the week. I'll talk about the days of the week in Japanese, French (and by extension other Romance languages), as well as a little bit in English.
I noticed something pretty amazing a while ago.
I’m sure many serious researchers have studied this topic very seriously, but I'm not one of them. I'll just share what I've noticed and a few explanations I know.
First, let's review the names of the days if you don't speak Japanese or French. This applies to all Romance languages because it's really about Latin. However, since French is my native language, I’ll focus on it instead of constantly repeating, "as well as other Romance languages."
In Japanese, each day of the week is composed of three kanji, or characters, but the last two are the same for every day, and they roughly mean "day of." For the sake of clarity and simplicity, I won't include them in the table below. In Japanese too, they're often omitted in timetables and similar documents.
For example, Monday is 月曜日, so we'll only write: 月.
Next to the kanji, you'll find the meaning in parentheses, though you may have already figured that out. If you’re familiar with Taoism, you’ll notice that the days from Tuesday to Saturday are associated with the five traditional elements: fire, water, wood, metal, and earth.
You may be wondering why I'm suddenly alluding to Taoism when it didn't spread to Japan. Because it's an important part of Chinese philosophy, and China greatly influenced Japan about 1,300 years ago. This influence included introducing writing to Japan (kanji means "Chinese characters"), the days of the week, and many other things. However, since I’m more familiar with Japanese culture, I’ll focus on that to avoid saying anything silly. I could be wrong—I know almost nothing about Chinese languages—but I believe the days of the week we're talking about here aren't used in modern Chinese anymore.
Okay, that’s nice, but what's my point?