We haven’t learned to count yet, but last week, among other things, we learned the days of the week: poniedzielek (Monday), wtorek (T), sroda (W), czwartek (Th), piatek (F), sobota (Sat), and niedziela (Sun). How a culture names its days, keeps its time, is a subject of no little curiosity and even some poetry. The Slavs, including the Poles, begin their week on Monday, not on Sunday, and their calendars run Monday to Sunday, not Sunday to Saturday. The names of their days are, for the most part, prosaically ordinal. Czwartek and piatek translate almost literally as “fourth” and “fifth”; wtorek derives from an archaic word for “two” or “second”; sroda comes from another word, srodek, which means “middle” or “center,” so that that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday read more or less literally as 2nd day, middle of the week, 4th day, and 5th day. In sobota we can rather easily see “Sabbath.” Sunday and Monday hold slightly more etymological interest for me and raise a question. Sunday, niedziela, derives from nie (“no”) and dziala (“activity, work”), that is, “the day of no work,” as in the biblical injunction that on the seventh day ye shall rest. Monday adds the syllable po, which means “after.” Monday then is “the day after the day of no work.” Which raises the question: why do Slavs begin the week by looking back to a previous day, the previous week? The first day of the week references something prior to the first. Why not look ahead?
English and German day names, referring as they do to Norse gods, Mani, Tiw, Wodin, Thor, Frige, and the Roman god Saturn, pack considerably more myth, mystery, and thunder in their week, but the situation reverses completely when we consider the names of the months—which we haven’t gotten to yet in Beginning Polish, but adventurous students sometimes go off on their own. Consider our September, October, November, December, the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month in the old Roman calendar, now recalibrated as our 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th month. (Good thing nobody knows Latin anymore, how confusing.) And now hear the Polish: wrzesien (the month of heather), padziernik (the month of broken flax), listopad (the month of the fallen leaves), and grudzien (the month of the frozen, clotted earth). Poetry here. I resolve to pass my weeks under the gods, and my months among the Poles.
