I could hear my husband in the other room saying, ‘Dee-day, dee-day, dee-day’ and there didn’t seem any reason to think that he would stop.
I could hear my husband in the other room saying, ‘Dee-day, dee-day, dee-day’ and there didn’t seem any reason to think that he would stop. Since he obviously wanted to be asked what he meant, I asked him what he meant. ‘Do you say Wednesday or Wednesdee?’ he asked.
The answer is, I think, that it depends how emphatic I’m being. But it is not the last syllable of Wednesday that has been giving me trouble recently. It is the first. When I heard somebody on the wireless pronouncing it Wed-nz-day I began to doubt my own senses. Surely, I thought, everyone says Wenz-day. The Oxford English Dictionary confirmed that the standard pronunciation is Wenz-day or Wenz-di (which pleased my husband). It did note, though, that a ‘d’ before the ‘n’ survives in the pronunciation of the North. Yet I suspect that the aberrant speaker on the radio took his own version, not from his forebears, but from a spelling pronunciation — like someone pronouncing each syllable of Marylebone.
The spelling does show that once the day was consciously named after Woden. It seems that our English ancestors meant the name to be equivalent to the Roman god Mercury, since the middle day of the week was in Latin dies Mercurii. The English were not yet living in England when they adopted this denomination. I find it impressive that the Angles, while living in the corner of Schleswig known as the Angle, should be keen to learn from the Romans.
As it happened, they slightly misinterpreted the position, since the Romans meant to name the middle day of the week after the plant Mercury, rather than the god whose name the planet bore. Woden, whom the English and kindred Germanic nations recognised as the equivalent of Mercury, was their chief god, as Tacitus noted in the first century ad.
Most of the Romance languages borrow the Latin word for the day, rather than translate the idea. But on Saturday there is a change. For that day, the English did not supply their equivalent deity for Saturn, but borrowed the Latin name. The Romance languages, however, took the name for this day from the Sabbath. They differed too in naming the first day of the week as the Lord’s Day, while the still pagan Angles and Saxons were happy with the Sun.
Although we do not, most of us, sacrifice human beings to Woden, at least our days have some interest to their names, unlike those of the poor Portuguese, who number them dully, like airport terminals.
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