09/09/2020

Why Wednesday? Viana explains in Folha de S. Paulo.

Imagem: Folha de calendário publicada na revista holandesa De Groene Amsterdammer – Reprodução

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

As a child in Portugal, I found the names of the days of the week strange. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… What kind of nonsense is that? Why "Tuesday" and not "third"? And why isn't there a "first-day"? Dona Isaura, my teacher and mother, didn't know the answers, but happily pondered that "it's better than in other languages that give names of pagan gods".

In English, German, and other Germanic languages, the days of the week are named after deities: Sun, Moon, Tiw, Woden (Odin), Thor, Frigga, and Saturn. In Latin languages, such as French, Spanish, and several others, "Sunday" has Christian origins (" dies dominicus," the Lord's day), and "Saturday" comes from Jewish tradition ("Shabbat"). But in almost all of these, the other days continue to be named after gods: Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Venus. The only exception is Portuguese, and this peculiarity is attributed to a notable individual who lived in the Fridays century: Saint Martin of Dume.

At the time, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Iberian Peninsula was occupied by two groups of Germanic peoples: the Suebi, in the northwest region, currently occupied by Galicia and northern Portugal, and the Visigoths, in the rest of the territory. The Suebi capital was the old Roman Bracara Augusta, today the city of Braga.

Born in what is now Hungary, Martin studied in the Holy Land, Rome, and Paris, from where he moved to the Suebian kingdom. There, he founded several monasteries, the first of which was in the village of Dume, near Braga. Evidence of his extraordinary influence, in 556 this monastery became a diocese in its own right, with Martin as bishop, a unique case in the history of the Church. Three years later, he added Dume to the diocese of the capital, Braga.

His greatest achievement was the conversion of the kingdom from Arianism to Catholicism, which earned him the title of "apostle of the Suebi". Certain that it was unworthy of a good Christian to invoke the names of pagan gods, he imposed ecclesiastical terminology for the days of the week: "dies dominicus", "secunda feria", "tertia feria", "quarta feria", "quinta feria", "sexta feria" and "sabath". Here "feria" means "day off" (like our holidays) — and not fair. This also explains "terça", derived from the Latin "tertia".

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.