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- Topic: Swedish >
- "Det är ett undantag."
9 Comments
302
I have a really weird mnemonic for this one. It's from Blur's "Parklife": "I get up when I want except on Wednesdays." It's the likeness between "onsdag" and "undantag" that helps me remember.
1329
Thanks a lot for this insight, i love to learn words' origin ! :D In french, days' names are from gods too : Lune (moon : lundi), Mars (mardi), Mercury (mercredi), Jupiter (jeudi), Venus (vendredi), (+ saturn for samedi and Dieu (God) for dimanche) I just read that tirsdag comes from Tyr, torsdag from Thor, and Fredag from Freyja. I guess I won't forget that.
That is correct.
There was also a pair of siblings in Norse mythology who were so beautiful that the higher gods punished them, by putting the older sister onto the wagon which pulled the sun around the earth, and the younger brother onto the wagon which pulled the moon. The sister was called Sol, or Sunna, and the brother was called Måne. So måndag and söndag are the moon's day and the sun's day, respectively.
So six out of seven weekdays are named for gods. And then we have lördag, which is named for the old tradition of taking a weekly bath (löga, archaic otherwise) on Saturdays. :p
1329
Oh, that's interesting. The moon is traditionnaly "feminine" and the sun "masculine" in several cultures, nice to see it reversed here. Thanks for the lördag explanation ! We're lucky the bath was a weekly thing and not a monthly one... xD