The Seven Days and Their Names

Abstract

The names of the week days in some languages go back to antiquity, while in others they have been introduced relatively recently. The present study was undertaken to elucidate the general conventions governing the formation of the day names and to examine the degree to which the world's languages follow these conventions. The language data for this article were collected from standard reference works, over 250 dictionaries in Halifax and Toronto libraries, as well as from the resources of the Internet.