Watching my second-grader son unsuccessfully try to learn English Thursday (i.e. Thursday) I became interested in the origin of this clumsy word (do you like the sound of th?). It immediately became clear that Thursday is the day of Thor the Thunderer, and this alone was enough for me to remember this word forever. Before, I confess, I often confused the letters.
Next, a working hypothesis arose about a possible connection between the day of thunder and our “rain on Thursday”, which I rushed to check.
Yandex dictionaries immediately gave me an article from the “Collection of Figurative Words and Allegories” of 1904, where the connection was not only confirmed, but also gave it a moralizing connotation:
Thursday – Donnerstag, Thursday, Jeudi, – the day of thunder, Thor, Jupiter, – Slavic Perun. He was prayed for rain. Christians, convinced of the impotence of these prayers to the overthrown God, expressed their distrust of him by saying that what would not happen, they said, it would happen – after the rain on Thursday.
But for some reason, it seems to me that this very “distrust” and mockery did not appear in the proverb immediately, and initially the phrase “after a rain on Thursday” could mean just a 100% guaranteed and inevitable event.
This is all speculation, but what about at least some facts? To give the study solidity, I tried to find statistics on the amount of precipitation depending on the day of the week. On the site rp5.ru, there was an opportunity to export the archive of weather for a significant period of time to a file. But how to “digest” this file and analyze it? There was no suitable tool at hand and I climbed to look further.
The only reasonable search result was note< /a> on answers.com, where some research students suggest Friday as the rainiest day of the week, which is presumably due to the accumulation of industrial and transport emissions in the atmosphere. Like, nature is cleansed by rains.
But back to etymology. Most dictionaries and encyclopedias very strangely deduce the genealogy of the word “Thursday” in the Germanic languages. Quoting wiki:
“Because the Roman god Jupiter was identified with a Germanic god with corresponding functions, most of the Germanic languages got the name of Thursday from the local variants of the Thunderer.”
That is, they indirectly let us know that initially the Germans did not consider Thursday the day of thunder and called it something else (or did not read the days at all). But then, after getting acquainted with the great Roman culture, they abruptly adopted this tradition, just “translating” the name of God … Such a scheme seems strange to me. How about evidence?
Еще пару находок:
- Thunder and Thursday are words with the same root.
- After rain on Thursday is not a proverb, but a saying.
And finally Therion will sing for us a funny song about Thor
Thor the mighty, Thor the brave
Crush the infidels in your way
By your hammer let none be saved
Live to die on that final day
Gods, monsters and men
We’ll die together in the end