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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.
That's great - the more mnemonics, the merrier imo.
As a beside, it's onsdag because it's Oden's dag - that is: it's the God Odin's day. Same with Wednesday, actually - "Woden's day". Maybe that'll help somebody's mnemonics too.
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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
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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
