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My Paper Days of Week
My Paper Days of Week
day denoted as the Sun’s day or the day of the Sun, and a moon day, or day of the moon. Now when we take a
closer look at what the words for the days of the week in Japanese, we are liable to pass it off as mere
coincidence, the similarities are striking. The following table shows the words for days of the week in Japanese
and in English.
Kasei has as its base fire, which would be translated fire day. In English our equivalent of fire’s day is
Tuesday, named after the Tiu the god of war and the sky. But before the Germanic peoples renamed the second
day of the week Tuesday, the Romans had a system of naming the days of the week after their god and had
called it dies martis ‘day of mars’, after the war god (source of French Mardi ‘Tuesday’). (Ayto, 544)
The kanji for Saturday being read do or basically the term for dirt or dirt’s day but is also the root of the
As for the third day of the week, some languages call it the 3rd day or day 3(Vietnamese)1 In Japanese
this day is denoted as Suiyobi or day of the water, water’s day. The Germanic peoples called this day woden’s
day or day of Odin after one of their mightiest gods. It seems that Wednesday got all screwed up being filtrated
through the evolution of languages. It makes sense because Wednesday is in the middle of the week and if there
are going to be corruptions from the pure form from whence the original words came from then the word for the
middle of the week makes sense. In Japanese the word for mercury is kasei which would find its relations to our
Now Thursday was named after the god Thor (where our English thunder comes from) but in the Roman
system of naming the days of the week the fourth day was names dies jovis or day of Jupiter. In Japanese the
fourth day is denoted Moku sei or day of the tree which is from the same root as that for their word for Jupiter,
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Interview with Andy Nguyen
Now Friday is denoted as Kinsei or day of gold in Japanese which is the same root for the word for
planet kinsei which is Venus. The Germanic peoples called it after Odin’s wife Frigg (Ayto, 241) ‘Frigg’s day’
was a direct adaptation of Latin Veneris dies “Venus’s day’ (whence French vendredi ‘Friday’)