Beware the Lides of March
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
The days of the week come from the seven major heavenly bodies known in the classical era. In English, in a bit of Roman syncretism, the Roman Gods associated with some of the planets were largely replaced with their Germanic equivalents (except, mysteriously Saturday—from Saturn), but the Spanish names (modulo the weekend) retain their Roman origins: Martes (Tuesday) = Mars, Miercoles (Wednesday) = Mercury, Jueves (Thursday) = Jupiter (the cognate is more obvious when you consider the inflected forms of Jupiter have the root iov- which is evident in the phrase, “by Jove”), Viernes (Friday) = Venus.
So Tuesdays in March are a bit of double-dipping for the god of war. As a pacifist, I cannot recommend celebrating these in a martial manner.
As do the French, Italian, and Catalan names.
But Portuguese, no. For Monday to Friday they use something like “second”, “third”, “fourth”, “fifth”, “sixth”.
And that, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, is similar to the days of the week in Arabic.
In Galician (which is very similar to Portuguese), the days of the week use the Roman-derived names, unlike Portuguese.
Though in English it's Thor, a different god of thunder.
In more observant Christian countries, the weekend was taken over by religion. In Italian/French/Spanish, Sunday is domenica/domingo/dimanche, from Latin "domine", "of the Lord"; and sabato/sabado/samedi is from "shabbat".
Btw, I don't know why you skipped "moon day", which is a direct translation of the Latin lunae dies (hence lunedì/lunes/lundì). That survived even better than the others.
>> Lide...is recorded almost exclusively in sources from the southwest of England. In the late 13th century...
The Great Vowel Shift happened later than this, so perhaps it was something like LEED-AH?
>> The etymology of ‘Lide’ goes back to the Old English name Hlyda
Looking up a pronounciation for Hlyda, I find:
hlȳda, m.n: March. (HLUE-dah / ˈhlyː-da)
Or was it more like LOOD-AH?