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In Basque the words for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are: astelehena, asteartea and asteazkena, literally "beginning of week", "between week" and "end of week" respectively. People have thought that at some point the Basques had a three day week with the later days innovations, but I don't think it has been shown definitively. Interesting anyway...
What are the words for Thursday through Sunday?
Osteguna, ostirala, larunbata, igandea. Not sure of the etymologies of those, but Trask's dictionary probably has them.
Thursday: ortzegun (L LN HN), orzegun (L LN), ostegun (G HN LN), ostĂ©gĂŒn (Z), ostĂ©gun (R), orzĂ©gun (R) n. âThursdayâ. 1617. + egun âdayâ. This word, which looks so much like a calque of Lat. Jovis dies âThursdayâ (lit., âday of Jupiterâ), possibly provides some support for the idea, discussed above, that the first element might once have been the name of a sky-god or a thunder-god. But a calque along the lines of âthunder-dayâ also appears plausible. However, M. (1972f: 307) points out that a derivation from bortz ~ bost âfiveâ + egun âdayâ would be formally perfect, by P9, and semantically acceptable if the days of the week are counted from Sunday. See also ortzirale, below, and see eguen (under egun).
Friday: ortzirale (L LN), ortzilare (L LN R), orzirale (L), orzilare HN LN R), ostirale (LN), osti(r)ĂĄle (Z), ostrĂĄle (R), orzilĂĄre (R), ostiral (G) n. âFridayâ. 1622. Final element obscure. See also barikua {~ bariaku under afari.}
Saturday: larunbat (G HN L LN), laurenbat (old B G), laranbate (old LN *) ** n. âSaturdayâ. ** [FHV 95, 491, 501] Many have seen this as laurden âquarterâ (see lau [1]) + bat âoneâ, since Saturday completes the week, and a week is roughly one quarter of a month. But M. **{(1971b),} (1977a: 491) cautiously suggests a derivative of lagun âcompanionâ, perhaps *lagunen bate âgathering of companionsâ, + -en {[1]} Gen. + a verbal noun from batu âget togetherâ (see bat). Cf. neskanegun (under neska).
Sunday: igande (G HN L LN), igĂĄnte (Z R) n. âSundayâ. 1545. + -te {[1]} NFS (M. **{1971b: 586 n.12}). Though phonologically perfect, this etymology is semantically odd, and it is not certain, but it seems likely. The original sense was app. âascension (day)â. Cf. Russian voskresĂ©nâe âSundayâ, originally âresurrectionâ. See domeka.*
These are all from R. L. Trask (2008) "Etymological Dictionary of Basque".
This is a very interesting topic. The article is well written, but _in my opinion_ the concept of the 7-day-long week is not artificial at all.
Like a comment says, it is a fraction of a lunar month. Many of the ancient calendars were based on the Moon.
Little self-promotion: I recently started a newsletter with little similar curiosities about culture, religion, myths, and folklore I found around â
I don't doubt that this relationship strongly influenced the choice, but it does not answer the question of whether there are any practical consequences following from it.
The phases of the moon do have two practical consequences that I can think of: night-time illumination and the height of the tides, but the week/lunar month ratio is far enough from being an integer that these issues vary significantly from week to week. For the same reason, you cannot use the moon to tell where one week ends and another begins; you have to count the days, just as you would for some other choice.
Seasons also play a role. 7 day weeks can be neatly broken up into 4 13-week seasons (roughly, you end up with an extra day and a quarter to contend with).
Between lunar phases and seasons, itâs a fairly natural choice for people living outside of the tropics.
Edit: to add, for pre modern people, tracking seasons was obviously very important and worth counting systematically. Simply counting lunar phases isnât reliable given that a lunar year is only ~354 days.
Seasons are definitely more important than the lunar cycle, but forcing them into four equal intervals seems rather procrustean - and there are many parts of the world where doing so does not reflect the realities of the climate.
Well yes, but not every part of the world had a 7 day calendar either. That universality came with colonialism.
Fair enough, but is there any evidence that the seasons influenced the selection of a seven-day week in those areas where it was adopted freely?
To be totally transparent, I do not have any evidence at hand to speak to that thesis.
I reply to myself to add a note, always from my personal notes â I'm almost surely wrong. Here[^1] it is quite well summed up: the Moon was only the beginning, the easiest phenomenon to observe.
The fact that seven planets were "easily visible" with no astronomical tools surely helped, and in some civilizations the days were named along these.
Religions, finally, "officially" decided that a week had to have seven days.
[^1]:
https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/7-days-week.html
It is a fraction of the lunar monthâŠabout 1/4.2. Thatâs hardly a nice clean division of the lunar month. Youâd be a heck of a lot closer with 5 weeks of 6 days each!
Have 4 seven-day weeks, with an extra "holiday" every month for the new (or full) Moon consisting of alternating one and two days. Average month: 29.5 days.
Or just a 13 month calendar of 28 days each, plus a floating "year day" and "leap day" that aren't a part of any week or given any week day designation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
that'd be super cool. one or two days off every month! (in addition to weekends)!
In the pre-computer days it would make things like computing interest harder.
In Rome, interest and rent were mostly computed by the month, and the days inserted to keep the calendar aligned were deliberately between years to make these calculations easy to do (no interest or rent was due, and they could not be used as start or stop days of contractual relationships).
Using a pencil influenced other modern things too, like the Dow indexes and GDP.
Powers of 2 tend to be superior for more factors. Four weeks means we can easily reason about halves and quarters of months. Five weeks means we can only easily reason about fifths of months.
For a similar reason, it might have been better if humanity had settled on a base 12 number system rather than base 10. We can only easily halve 10 while we can easily halve, third, and quarter 12. More factors means it's more intuitive to reason about common fractions of things.
Earlier civilizations did use base 12, and we still have elements of that history in common use, like the special names for eleven and twelve in the English language and our 12 hour clocks. A common theory for the prevalence of myths about 6 fingered foreigners in the Bible is that these other cultures used base 12 numbers, and the only way people using base 10 could understand that was to assume that they must have 6 fingers to count with. Interestingly, you can actually use your fingers to count to 12, using the 3 segments on each of your 4 fingers rather than the 5 whole fingers.
> Powers of 2 tend to be superior for more factors. Four weeks means we can easily reason about halves and quarters of months. Five weeks means we can only easily reason about fifths of months.
Sure, but the nice 4 week period is not actually anywhere close to a lunar month, so the "groupings of 4 weeks" part makes sense because 4 is a nice number, but the "7 days to a week because 4 of them will add up to a lunar month" thing is just not even close. We're not talking about something like leap seconds where the drift is slow relative to a human lifespan. 28 days is a whole day and a half shorter than a lunar month.
It's related to the lunar phases, not a purely mathmatical division.
But lunar phases... are a mathematical division? 1/4?
New moon and full moon are real things you can see, not an arbitrary mathematical division. And then the first / third quarter is just halfway between. Results in about 7 days per lunar quarter.
But it's really not even close to "about 7 days per lunar quarter," at least not close enough that using the calendar can tell you anything useful about when future new moons will be. Even if you're just looking ahead 4 weeks you'll already miss the new moon by a day and a half!
We can see the result of (not arbitrary, but) precise mathematical divisions. "Halfway between" is a mathematical division. I must be missing something huge here.
[EDIT:] Nevermind, I'm an idiot!
>A lunar cycle is 27 days plus a little less than 8 hours.
That is the lunar orbital period, but from earth it appears as though it takes ~29.5 days for the moon to cycle through its phases(this longer period is termed the 'lunation'). The difference is due to the earth-moon system orbiting around the sun, so by the time the moon has completed it's orbital period around the earth, the earth-moon system has rotated around the sun ~1/13 of its period, changing the angle at which the moon is illuminated, which is what determines the apparent phase of the moon as observed from earth. So the moon has to travel a bit further than its full orbit to appear as though its completed a cycle as viewed from earth.
The lunar cycle is 29.5 days,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase
I always wondered about this. If one was lost in the wilderness with general amnesia, one could figure out the month and day eventually, by counting from the winter/summer solstice, but there would no way of figuring out what day of the week it is without consulting a calendar.
Unlike the rest of the calendar, the week is more a social construct that allows for better coordination and cooperation between people. Like which side of the road you drive on, the exact choice doesn't matter so long as everyone does the same thing.
You might be able to tell the year from astronomical observations, assuming you still know some facts like the dates of earlier eclipses, conjunctions, ....
Once you know the year, month and day you could calculate the day of the week using the doomsday rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule
I have often reflected about this. To me, it feels like that the week is not as "artificial" as claimed in the article. Working 6 days feels like the maximum before a full day of rest is needed for the body and the mind. It's just a feeling though...
I think working 6 days requires much more than a single day to recover. All things considered, I'd agree that it is the "maximum", but it isn't really common to work 6 days a week in the IT industry, is it? I know for sure it's very common in retail.
The week is related to the phases of the moon. Aproximately four phases per month.
Why four phases? Why not 3 or 10? You can divide the month up any number of ways to create âweeksâ.
The Romans had 8-day âweeksâ
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae
Lunar phases are a natural phenomenon, traditionally you observe four phases. The more detailed model knows eight phases.
But isn't 4 where the randomness comes in?
See this comment by another poster:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29431103
yeah, but seven 4-day weeks per month seems weird. And not too many other ways to divide 28
The week is merely a convenient integer division of a lunar calendar.
We need to stop this bullshit of adding misterious meaning to stuffs and calling everything we donât understand a social construct. Not because they are not, but because this is basically a useless tautology.
Telling that the society socially constructed the concept of a week based on the integer divisors of the duration of the lunar month adds no useful information and distorts language with what by now is just a tired cliché