Boxing Daze
 

Something to puzzle over while you finish off the turkey and stumble around looking for something that's still drinkable.

A silver star for anyone who can say where the NAMES for the days of the week come from.

And a gold star if you can also say why they are in the order they are.

This works in most European derived languages.
I'd be interested if anyone can broaden it to other parts of the world.

UJ

:eek: :confused: ???????????????????????????????


boxing day is good...usually there's the cricket

stupid melbourne weather

You Aussies get all the breaks, But what's cricket without a little weather thrown in for added interest.

Have a relaxing day.

UJ

you mean like thursday is named after the God of thunder, thor (from the vikings)

That sort of thing, but there's a little more to it.
How about a full list then.

UJ

From Nordic Mythology we have:

Søndag (sunday) comes from Soldag (the Suns day)

Mandag (monday) comes from Månedag (the Moons day)

Tirsdag (tuesday) comes from Tyrsdag (The Bulls day)

Onsdag (wedensday) from Odinsdag, (odin is king of the gods)
and odin is called Wodinaz in germnic, therefore Wedensday

Torsdag (thursday) form Thorsdag, Thor is god of thunder

Fredag (friday) from Frejdag , Frej is god of love

Saturday for some reason is from the latin word Saturnus which means saturn - In the Nordic countries its called Lørdag, which comes from Luddag which translates to Bathingday (howz that spelled)

Happy?

http://www.greenheart.com/billh/origin.html

Has a table that shows the origins for contemprary languages and some antiquity languages.

We can always rely on Xerxes :)

Oddly enough the explaination I was given is exactly the point rejected here on the Greenheart site.

quote
There's an alternate explanation for how the same "planets" came to be used to name days of the week in their present order. It assumes that the sequence of hours dedicated to these sky gods resulted from the length of their orbital periods in Earth-days. But this would have required using Earth's year in place of a value for the Sun, and lunation's instead of the Moon's yearly period. It also requires "planetary leaps," skipping two planets at a time when assigning day names, all very improbable procedures.

This is said to have originated with the Babylonians astronomical/astrlogical studies.
They would have it that there are seven days, each divided into three parts, cardinal, fixed and mutable no doubt.
Each 1/3 part of the day was ruled by one of the planets and in the order of speed in which the planets(wanderers) appeared to move against the fixed stars.

Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon.

This gives the scheme :

Saturn ... Jupiter ... Mars
Sun ....... Venus .... Mercury
Moon ..... Saturn ... Jupiter
Mars ...... Sun ....... Venus
Mercury .. Moon ..... Saturn
Jupiter ... Mars ...... Sun
Venus .... Mercury .. Moon

i.e. this scheme is based on the siderial year, rather than solar or lunar, but seems just as probable as the first.

Having got that out of the way you may like to ponder on the spacings of the notes in a Diatonic scale(doh, re, mi ....)

Any explainations for the spacings, and where did the NAMES of the notes come from

UJ

gah! All the calendar stuff gets so mathematical and confusing...

Not surprising really, It's what much of early mathematics was developed from, they were full of special numbers 3,7,12 etc and special relationships between numbers, areas, pi even.

UJ