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Servais @dormi.zone

7mo ago

Origin of the third day of the week the different European languages

18 comments

Of course we can't even agree if it's the third or the fourth day
- Most of my life I wondered why it's called "middle of the week" when actually Thursday's the day with an equal number of days in a week coming before and after. I often thought maybe weekend's subtracted. Only in my late 20s I learned that there are places where the first day of the week is Sunday lol
  
  The funny part is the green countries in this map don't start the week on a sunday. I guess they used to and the name stayed
  
  I'm swiss and I always assumed its because of the workweek being Monday to Friday. But only a few decades ago Saturday was pretty mich a workday as well, so that probably isnt it
- More directly, we can't agree if Sunday or Monday is the first day. IMO Sunday is the first day. Calendars look better with the weekends acting like bookends.
- Index 0 vs Index 1.

Estonia is incorrect as well, in Estonian Wednesday would be "kolmapäev", which translates to "third day"
- Thanks!

In Basque language the third day of the week is called asteazkena, "the last day" (aste=week azken=last) because the ancient Basque weeks only had three days. So astelehena= first day of the week = Monday. Asteartea=middle day = Thursday.

In Kosovo the majority is Albanian so they would say Merkure.

For Northern Africa it's Fourth day too (in Arabic)

I didnt know the hungarian one had any meaning, its probably from old hungarian or another language.
Interesting facts about the days of the week in hungary: monday means the head of the week and sunday is market day(i think you can figure out why). The rest dont really make sense in modern hungarian.

In the US: hump day.
- In the US: the third day is Tuesday.

In Belgium we also speak Flemish, which is a dialect of Dutch, and German. So Belgium should be orange, red and blue.
- It's a map of countries, not languages... There are a lot more situations in Europe where the boundaries of languages don't align with political borders.
  Some other problems:
  Kosovo is colored the same way as Serbia, but there are by far more Albanians live there, so it should be the colored that way.
  What the hell is the color of Switzerland. Is it colored according to the Rhomansh, a language spoken by 40 thousand people, 0.5% of the population?
  this is a very shitty map.

Are you trying to tell us Scots and Irish don't eat on wednesdays - they just survive on irn-bru and guinness ??

18 comments