Days of the Week

Sheş five, dü şeş, hep yek, car-ü dü, pencü se, they love the beautiful young man. 

Do you like backgammon? It's a fun game. I like it. It dates back to 3000 BC. So it's a 5,000 year old game! 

For some reason we use Persian terms when we play. We repeat the dice with Persian numbers. 

However, it is not clear who invented and thought of this game. 

It is said that even the Romans had a similar game. But we learned it from the Persians, that's for sure. Although I think it is called nard in Iranian language. I know for sure that it is called nard in Azerbaijan. I read on the internet that backgammon is a form of nard. It is also called nard in Russian.

Actually, when we Turks met Persian culture, for some reason we liked this culture very much. Maybe because it is a more ancient culture than ours. 

There are so many words from Persian in our language that it would be impossible to count them here.  

From rice to cotton, seed to sugar, fire to pitch, glass to life, liver, tent, remedy, noodles, tarhana, lentils, cheese, stew, pickle, poplar, oak, plane, rich to money, spring to time, navy blue, emerald, many more, all Persian words, many more words have passed into our language from Persian.

Even most of the days of the week are Persian.

Cıhar-Şhenbe, the fourth day, we call it Wednesday. 

Penc-şenbe, the fifth day, we call it Thursday.

Bazaar, a place for shopping, a shopping day, we call it Sunday.

These are Persian.

Even "week" is Persian, it means something with seven, heft, seven!

Not only Persian, of course, but Arabic words are also abundant in our language. 

If we look at it in terms of days:

Selase, sellase, means third (day) in Arabic, we call it Tuesday.

We say Friday, the day of gathering! Cem, cemaat, camia, mosque, gathering, society, community, gathering place. 

We got these from Arabic too.

I think it means the day after Friday and the day after Sunday. "Erte" is Turkish, thank God! Its root is the word "er-", meaning "to be, to reach". Man has the same root! It means postponed, matured. Saturday is a more mature, mature version of Friday. Monday is the same.

It seems very strange to me that today we use days of the week that we borrowed from different languages. Don't we have names for the days in our culture? Why are they all in Arabic or Persian?

The number seven is also interesting, seven solstices, seven days in a week. Where did the seven days of the week come from?

Actually, as we all know, today we use a tens counting system. This is because we have ten fingers. When human beings started counting, they used their fingers. I touched on this subject in one of my articles. 

Why isn't a week 10 days for example, right?

I did some research. Here's what I could find:

The number seven used to be considered sacred for many societies. It is a special number.

The seven layers of the earth, the seven layers of heaven, the creation of the world in seven days? 

The seven wonders of the world?

In Christianity, it was also used a lot in the religious field, seven churches, seven angels, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven stars.

The number seven is actually present in many concepts. Even Hormuz had seven husbands, didn't she? Funny movie!

I say let's look at the number seven first, what is the magic of seven?

From India to Denmark, the number seven has pioneered many concepts. But the number seven is thought to have originated in Babylon. 

Children of the stars! In Babylon, people believed that they were the children of the stars they saw in the sky.

Babylon was the first place in history where star movements in the sky were first tracked. The first records originate from Babylon. 

(Babylon is the name of the empire founded in 1894 BC in Mesopotamia, encompassing Sumerian and Akkadian lands around the city of Babylon, from which it takes its name. The center of Babylon was located in the town of al-Hilla in today's Iraq.)

At that time, the Babylonians detected five bright stars in the sky. Actually, these were not stars, of course, but planets. That's why they are brighter than other stars. Add the moon and the sun and the total is seven. Name each day after someone and a week is seven days. 

Well, that's understandable, but still, where did the seven days of the week come from? Why the number seven? There must be some other reason?

I think it's because of the lunar cycles.  Every 29.5 days there is a full moon in the night sky. Then there's a day and a half in between, during the new moon period, when the moon is not visible at all. That's 28 days. Divide by four and you get 7. Since it was impractical to name each day up to 28, they apparently decided on 7. Seven might have made sense. And with only seven celestial bodies in the sky, the gods couldn't have been wrong. Seven is the lucky number!

Our counting system is in tens, but unfortunately the moon does not show a transformation in accordance with this tens system. In the past, mankind could not find anything more suitable for determining the days than the moon. It is possible to define the different appearances of the moon in seven different orders. 

Therefore, here is the number seven! 

Seven is both a mystical number and a number blessed by the gods. In this case, you can attribute even more sacred meanings to this number, and that's that. Its sanctity will spread among people. 

And so it was!

This order spread from ancient Babylon to the Jews, then to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and then to all of Europe. On the other hand, the names of weeks and days spread to the Persian and Arab world, and then eastward to India.

Starting in Babylonia and today all over Europe, the names of the days were mostly inspired by the names of the five planets known at the time, plus the moon and the sun. Although the names of some days were later inspired by the names given to the gods in Europe in those days, the seven-day week and day names spread from Babylon to the world.

So how was it for us Turks? Although we have been influenced by Persian and Arab cultures and have taken the concept of the week and the names of the days from these cultures, I wonder if we also had our own date order at the time?

In the first known written sources in Turkish history, it is mentioned that writing began with historical information. So it seems that we also had our own date and calendar organization.

First of all, we gave animal names to the years, we named the years with twelve different animal names. 

Some of the inscriptions of the Gokturk Bengütaş have dates given according to this calendar. 

Most probably we took this system from the Chinese calendar system. Since we were very familiar with Chinese culture at that time, we were probably inspired by the Chinese. Although the calendar system of those times was used in many of the cultures living in Central Asia. So it is not so clear which culture is the source.

But we named the years differently than the Chinese. In our calendar, the years are named as follows:

1-Chican year

Year 2-Ud (bull, ox)

3-Bars year (pars, some tribes also use fox instead)

4-The year of the rabbit

5-Year of Luu (Luu, which means dragon in Chinese, was later transformed into "ulu" meaning "great", and in some different tribes this year is also referred to as the "year of the fish".

6-Year of the snake

7-Year of yearling (horse)

8-Sheep year

9-Bicin year (monkey, monkey)

10-Chicken year

Year of the 11-Horse (dog) 

12-The Year of the Pig

On the internet, they show in a table which animal corresponds to the years of today. Those who are curious can look it up, I did! (I was born in the year of the sheep)

By the way, dog is actually "dog", although today it is used in the general sense of the genus. Dog, köp, kep is the root word for dog, which used to be used for those with fluffier hair and more fluffy, bloated hair. In other words, it comes from the same root as the words "pregnant" and "gebermek", all of which are related to bloating! Speaking of which, I wanted to remind you.

Yes, in the documents, for the date, we use numbers for the month and day, after the animal name for the year. Like "the tenth day of the fourth month of the year of the sheep". Sometimes we also specified the seasons, like "fall season". 

But there is no concept of week and seven days in ancient Turkish sources! 

Our calendar has no start and end date! 

Only 12 animal names for years and numbers for months and days!

Today, we have adapted to the order of the modern world. We cannot go back to this old order. However, in this adaptation, we seem to have lost our essence.

I don't know, as dear Kemal Sunal, may he rest in peace for now, said in his movie: 

Tuesday shakes, 

Wednesday gets tangled in the sheet,

Thursday misery,

Friday is a blessed day,

Saturday and Sunday are holidays,

I wore the fez on Monday.

Although the rhyme is nice, maybe it's time to Turkishize the names of the days of the week. What do you think?

If we are going to do it, we should first find a Turkish name for the week and time. They are both Persian! 

Look, I used the word "isim" without realizing it, it's just a habit of mouth, I should have said "ad" instead of "isim" in terms of Turkish sensitivity, "isim" is also Arabic after all. 

Now I said "sensitivity", this is also an Arabic word, I should have said "sensitivity" instead. 

Excuse me? Is "result" also Arabic? I'm going crazy now, but can't we speak proper Turkish? Whatever I say ends up in another language!

I am actually very upset about this situation. There are too many foreign words in our language. We have been trying for years, but we have never been able to remove these foreign words from the language. 

Still, I shouldn't worry about it, because it's really not that complicated. Cultures are so intertwined that it feels like we can't separate them even if we really wanted to.

Still, I think we should be careful to use Turkish words as much as possible. 

After all (the result is Turkish, by the way), there is a huge Turkish culture behind us. 

I'm talking about the sister Turkic states. 

I think it's important to Turkicize our language in order to communicate with them too. 

Although there are a lot of Russian words in their language too, and many of the Russian words are Latin or French. In other words, the sister Turkic states have also undergone a different cultural erosion over the years.

Still, for a common future, we need to have a common language. 

So what do you say? Should we start with the days of the week? 

Does anyone have any suggestions? 

The rules for the creation of Turkish words are clear. 

We can say "day one, day two...". After all, that's what we say in Arabic and Persian. 

But my idea is to give each of them a nice day name. I think we also need to think of something for the word "week".

My suggestion is to change it for now, I will think about what we can replace it with.

If anyone has any suggestions, please write them in the comments.

Love and regards to everyone from Moscow for now