By Anatoly Liberman
This is a weekly blog, and ever since it began I have been meaning to write a post about the word week. Now that we are in the middle of the first week of the first summer month, the time appears to be ripe for my overdue project.
In Latin there was the word calendae (plural) “the first day of the month.” These dates were “called out” or proclaimed publicly (from calare “proclaim,” not related to Engl. call, unless we take into account the fact that the syllables kal ~ kol ~ gal ~ gol designate “voice” in many languages; therefore, all such words may go back to the same sound imitative complex). The calendae were “called out” because interest was due on the first day of the month; therefore, money changers’ account books of interest got the name calendaria. Fortunately, our calendar (from Latin via Old French) does not remind us of debts and taxes only. Unlike calendar, week is possibly a Germanic word. Why “possibly” will become clear at the end of the post.
We will pass over the question about the origin of the seven day week but remember that, according to the Bible, the creation of the world took a week. Consequently, after the Christianization of Europe a word designating the seven day week had to be coined. Among the Germanic speakers the Goths were the first to be converted to Christianity (this happened in the 4th century), and long fragments of the Gothic Bible have come down to us, though almost only of the New Testament. As a result, we do not know how their bishop Wulfila translated, or would have translated, the Hebrew (or the Greek) word for “week.” The possibilities for naming the week are not too few. For example, Russian nedelia (stress on the second syllable), with cognates everywhere in Slavic, means “day on which no work is done”; the transference to “week” came later. A curious anti-parallel to nedelia may be Sardinian chida ~ chedda “week,” if, as has been suggested, it is a borrowing of Greek khedos “sorrow,” with reference to work and the “suffering” it entails. Yet for the Western translators of the Bible the main sources of inspiration were the ecclesiastic words containing the root for “seven,” namely, Latin septimana and Greek hebdomas. Hence Modern French semaine, Italian settimana, and Spanish semana. But Spanish also has hebdomada, and similar words have been recorded in many old and new Romance dialects.
We can now look at Germanic. In Gothic, the word wikon, the dative of the otherwise unattested wiko, occurred. It means “sequence” (not “week”!) and glosses Greek taxei, the dative of taxis (Engl. tactics, taxidermy, and taxonomy have its root). In the Latin version of Luke I: 8, ordine corresponds to Greek taxei and Gothic wiko. Old Engl. wice ~ wicu is akin to Gothic wiko, and at first sight their etymology poses no difficulty, for they seem to be related to the Germanic verbs for “move, turn; retreat; yield” (German weichen, Icelandic víkja, Old Engl. wician, and others). However, what exactly “moves” or “turns” during a week remains unclear, and various explanations have been offered, none fully convincing. Some Germanic cognates of week differ from the English noun considerably (compare German Woche and Danish uge), but they are still variants of the same word and mean the same, except Old Icelandic vika, which has two senses: “week” and “nautical mile.” Perhaps vika, before it acquired the meaning “week,” referred to the change of shifts in rowing. In my post on the etymology of Viking, I supported the idea that Vikings were called this fro