Jul 19., 2018   /   Everything, Evidence, Foreign Versions

Temerant Days of the Week- Japanese Edition

A recent post on reddit made me realize that there’s a tiny bit of context hidden away in the Japanese appendix. (Well pre-prendix? It’s at the front. This is a thing in Japan.)
Anyway, the days are written in Japanese characters, so they carry meaning in addition to pronunciation.

Below is what the Japanese edition says about the days of the week. (Note that the Japanese have a word for ten days. It is 一旬 (ichijun). )

一旬間（じゅんかん）」は次の七日+四日から成る.一旬間=十一日。一旬と表記されることもある
Translation: One 旬間 (juunkan) is made up of the following 7 days plus 4 days. One juunkan equals eleven days. It is also written as as 一旬 (ichijun).

Then it lists the days as shown in the table below.

*The book’s native language is English. This list is taken from the German edition. Some of these names have never appeared in the English edition, but many have. So we can assume the rest correspond to the English.

1) 黄 (ou) Pretty exclusively means yellow. There are a few obscure uses where it relates to celestial bodies, low light, and underground (particularly the underworld)
2) 目 (moku) most directly means eye. However, as one might imagine, it carries the same connotations of seeing, insight, etc that an eye does in most languages.
3) 茶 (cha) definitely means tea. At a stretch, it can mean brown because that’s tea colored. However, given its presence as the seventh day, and the fact that Chandrian is written phonetically in the Japanese edition as “cha-n-do-ri-a-n”, and its roots in the temic “chaen” discussed phonetically in the book, I think it’s safe to say that in this case the kanji was chosen for its sound. It’s not uncommon in Japanese over time for a symbol that sounds like the original symbol but means something different to become the norm in writing, so the idea that the wrong symbol for cha became associated with the day would be very in keeping with Pat’s world building.