Question About Weeks
Jan. 11th, 2009 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreOn Friday I was talking to one of the meteorologists at work and complained that it seems that the crappy weather is always on the weekend, when it is less convenient for me to deal with. She said that there really are some weather patterns that are 7 days in length. That led us to speculating about weeks.
Years are easy - there's the sun. And the moon determines months. Yes, both are approximations but they are close enough. The question is whether there is any actual physical basis for a week being 7 days. If it had to do with weather patterns, one would expect a different length of weeks in cultures in different climate zones. If you have a monsoonal pattern, for example, you might have a week that is shorter or longer than people have in temperate climates.
None of us knew the answer to this, but I wonder if there are (or have been) cultures in which a week is 6 days or 9 days or anything other than 7. Wikipedia is marginally helpful (and suggests the answer is "yes") but not entirely satisfying. This is more a subject for cocktail party chatter than actual serious inquiry, by the way.
By the way, I had sent an email to someone to cancel a meeting and titled it "need to cancel 21 Jan" without putting in the word "meeting". He replied that I shouldn't cancel January 21st because that would create the calendrical equivalent of a black hole. He did, however, give me permission to cancel April 15th.
Years are easy - there's the sun. And the moon determines months. Yes, both are approximations but they are close enough. The question is whether there is any actual physical basis for a week being 7 days. If it had to do with weather patterns, one would expect a different length of weeks in cultures in different climate zones. If you have a monsoonal pattern, for example, you might have a week that is shorter or longer than people have in temperate climates.
None of us knew the answer to this, but I wonder if there are (or have been) cultures in which a week is 6 days or 9 days or anything other than 7. Wikipedia is marginally helpful (and suggests the answer is "yes") but not entirely satisfying. This is more a subject for cocktail party chatter than actual serious inquiry, by the way.
By the way, I had sent an email to someone to cancel a meeting and titled it "need to cancel 21 Jan" without putting in the word "meeting". He replied that I shouldn't cancel January 21st because that would create the calendrical equivalent of a black hole. He did, however, give me permission to cancel April 15th.
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Date: 2009-01-11 05:21 pm (UTC)They are the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In Italian and French, the days of the week are named directly after those; for English, the Romans assigned Germanic/Norse gods to the same categories as the gods which they identified the planets with.
Obviously, the Romans weren't the first to associate days with planets or the number 7. Long before them, the Babylonians had that system, and, obviously, the ancient Hebrews had a seven-day week, as per the Seven Days of Creation story. But it is most likely that even the Hebrews got that system of seven from a sun, moon, and five naked-eye planet system.
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Date: 2009-01-11 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-11 10:56 pm (UTC)It seems that anthropologists define weeks by when market days are held. Which means they end up with anywhere from 3 to 8 days for different cultures. But that isn't very satisfying as it doesn't answer why market days are as far apart as they are.