Re: CHAT: Visible planets (was: Corpses)

Ray Brown scripsit:

> yes, but the ancients without light-pollution and having more time to
> star-gaze had spotted it, assigning the middle day of the week to the
> god of the planet.
The assignment of planets to days can be neatly accounted for as follows.
There are 168 hours in a week, which we'll make start on Saturday at
midnight for this purpose.  Assign each consecutive hour to a planet in
the order Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon in accordance
with the time of its (apparent) revolution around the Earth.  Repeat 24
times.

Then, adopting the convention that the planet assigned to midnight of each
day is assigned to the whole day, you get the following:

        Saturn's day
        Sun's day
        Moon's day
        Mars's day / Tiw's day
        Mercury's day / Woden's day
        Jupiter's day / Thor's day
        Venus's day / Freya's day

And there you are.

> Wednesday is still 'dydd Mercher', "Mercury's day"
> in modern Welsh, which is followed by 'nos Mercher', "Mercury's night".
Spanish and French follow the same pattern, of course, though not so
obviously.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
"The exception proves the rule."  Dimbulbs think: "Your counterexample proves
my theory."  Latin students think "'Probat' means 'tests': the exception puts
the rule to the proof."  But legal historians know it means "Evidence for an
exception is evidence of the existence of a rule in cases not excepted from."