I noticed this with Dutch vs English, except instead of Thor's Day, they have Thunder Day (Donderdag), which is still a reference to Thor. The other Dutch days are direct equivalents of the English words.
The Off-Topic and Random Thoughts Thread(Anything Goes!)
- Thread starter JCSteel
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Although they have adopted a modern and simplistic convention for naming the days with numbers, Chinese cosmology of the five elements 五行 wu xing, shown in the chart above (Japan uses the same ideograms), is very interesting.
The Five Elements is one of three prevalent philosophies that is applied to various parts of Chinese culture, including medicine, and categorizes all things into the domain of one of those symbols based on its observed interactions with the other four elements.
The so-called Yin-Yang symbol in the center of the Five Elements flowchart below is the Tai Ji Tu 太極圖, which is another philosophical system of understanding the interaction of forces.
Such philosophies of non-material forces and their understanding is almost extinct in the post-Enlightenment, materialist West, but even Mao could not wipe it out in China, not that he specifically tried, but so much else was lost.
The chart below shows the observed patterns of different elements creating, destroying or attenuating other elements. Some of the jargon is symbolic and flowery.
In Chinese medicine, wu xing provides a conceptual model that allows for diagnosis and treatment that a few Chinese medicine docs I know have told me is about 80% or more reliable for treatment and predicting how things will go.
I was at the store and saw a vagrant steal a few bags of groceries. Apparently, he does this all the time. Not long after this, another man came up to pay for the groceries that the vagrant had stolen. It's amazing how the Gospel shows itself in some and not at all in others.
Donderdag is the day where all of your evils will make the weather pound on you.
In a way:
"Thunderstorm"