From: hiraga@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Yuzuru Hiraga)
Subject: Re: Days of the Week in Japanese and Korean
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 11:24:44 GMT

In article <42881@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> mcovingt@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Maiko Covington) writes:
>One other thing I noticed is that the way to say
>days of the week is the same in Japanese and Korean (i.e. written
>with the same characters, if you wrote it in characters) but is
>different from Chinese. For example, "nitiyoubi" and "ilyongil" vs.
>"xing1qi1ri4" etc. 
>	Where did the "nitiyoubi"/"ilyongil" way of saying the days of the
>week originate? 

Err.. is it different in Chinese?

Well, the week-day names in Japanese (niti, getsu, ka, sui, moku, kin, do)
come from ON-YOU-DOU (or ONMYOU-DOU, Ying/Yang theory), and were originally
the name of the stars (sun, moon, and SEISHIN = stars, actually planets,
Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn).  This originated in China, and
would have been connected with some form of astrology.
Considering that the ordering is the same as in Western languages, and
that they are further rooted in ancient Mesopotamia, it should have
been imported to the orient at some time (though I don't know when).

There was a related discussion a couple of weeks ago -- I thought it was
in sci.lang (or was it fj.sci.lang?).


Henry Robertson writes:
>Before this, the Japanese ran on the Chinese zodiacal system of animals.

Well, yes and no (but more emphasis on no).
It is true that the days (as well as years) are named based on KANSHI
(=ETO: though this involves not only the zodiacal animals = JUUNISHI;
but also JIKKAN).  However, this hardly served the notion of "week"
in the present sense.
JIKKAN (a ten-fold system) is directly related to SEISHIN, or rather,
GOGYOU (i.e. five basic elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water);
in that the five are given upper/lower status of E or TO (hence the name
ETO); as in KINO-E, KINO-TO (upper wood, lower wood), etc.

To make things more complicated, there is also ROKUYOU (six-day week system)
also stemming from ON-YOU theory -- taian, shakku, senshou, tomobiki,
senbu, and butsumetsu.  This seems to be more common, though I don't
think any notion of week had much everyday significance in ancient/medieval
Japan.


Larry E. Cravetz writes:
>Tuesday = Zeus-day
>Wednesday = Odin's-day (Norse equiv of Saturn and Zeus)
>Thursday = Thor's-day (Thor was/is Odin and Freya's son)
>Friday = Freya's-day (Queen of the Norse Gods)
>Saturday = Saturn's-day

while Ilsa VanHook writes:
>planet    spanish   japanese  english  norse gods
>------    -------   --------  -------  ----------
>sun       domingo   nichi     sun      
>moon      lunes     getsu     mon
>mars      martes    ka        tues     tiw
>mercury   miercoles sui       wednes   wotan or woden
>jupiter   jueves    moku      thurs    thor
>venus     viernes   kin       fri      freya or frigga
>saturn    sabado    do        satur

Tuesday can't be Zeus-day (Jovial day is Thursday) --
Ilsa is correct, it comes from Tiw (or Tiu).
For Wednesday, "Odin" is the Norse name, while "Wotan" and "Woden"
are their German and Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
Freya and Frigg (Frigga, Fricca) are different dieties, and
Friday is Frigg's day.  Odin and Frigg are the ones that are married.
And I thought Odin and Thor are brothers (though I'm not sure).

It seems that the English names are quite mixed up (English, Latin,
Norse/German), as also are the month names.

BTW: can English speakers (rather, Western langauge speakers in general)
readily recognize the month ordinals and their names?
eg. August is the eighth month and vice versa?

-Yuzuru Hiraga