Days of the week

At the same time that I was working on the Koa dictionary and phrasebook that ended up being a Solstice gift for my girls in December 2022, I figured out a little corner of the Koa lexicon that had waited a long time for attention. It subsequently got buried in 2023's avalanche of important progress, so let's finally document this.

The names of days of the week had always felt like one of those areas whose development was bound to be marred by arbitrariness, something I felt powerless to take on in earlier Koa: there really is no reason -- as in derivation from core Koa principles -- that any one system would be superior to any other. Perhaps the most obvious option would be reference the days by number, sort of like in Portuguese, like

énapai "Monday" (one-day)
lúapai "Tuesday" (two-day)
tátupai "Wednesday" (three-day)

...and so on. There are two issues with that approach, though: (1) Which day should be day 1, Monday or Sunday?? I have my own feeling about this (as above), but Portuguese does it the other way. Where Koa usage varied from what felt sensible or natural to a learner, would using numbers actually make it feel less universal? (2) I just don't like the number days aesthetically. Sometimes I just have to grit my teeth and accept decisions that feel right even though they aren't my preference, but in this case I didn't feel that there was a strong reason to do so. Days of the week were one of the first places where the conceptual territories of Koa were being named; if the choices were going to be arbitrary, I wanted them at least to have poetry!

I liked the basis in nature of Sunday (sun) and Monday (moon), but not the rest of the Roman planet-based naming scheme. I looked for other nature words that might work, with the additional design goal of having every weekday name start with a unique letter for ease of abbreviation, and this just sort of tumbled out almost fully-formed:

E - ésipai "Monday" (moon-day)
A - ánupai "Tuesday" (water-day)
M - múnupai "Wednesday" (middle-day)
L - lúlupai "Thursday" (tree-day)
K - kívipai "Friday" (stone-day)
V - válopai "Saturday" (light-day)
S - súapai "Sunday" (sun-day)

(I suppose, thinking about it now, that I could have followed Koa alphabetical order with the assignment...though then I would again have had to grapple with which is the "first" day of the week! And more importantly, the poetry...)

Obviously this is a question of my own aesthetics, but I really, really, really like these. There have rarely been design decisions that have felt so "right" to me so easily.

In syntax, just like any other time words (like tana "today") these need a specifier if talking about them, or a temporal particle he if referencing the temporal position of an event:

po ésipai i hive
GEN Monday VB.CL awful
"Mondays are awful"

ai nu-ma-puhu pe ka lúlupai ai ka kívipai?
QU 1PL-CONT-speak BEN DEF Thursday QU DEF Friday
"Are we talking about Thursday or Friday?"

he ánupai ni-me-lía-pi níke-te
TEMP Tuesday 1SG-COM-too-QUANT meet-INSTANCE
"On Tuesday I have too many meetings"

As with other time words like viko "week," "last" is vime and "next" is sii: ka/he múnupai vime "last Wednesday," ka/he súapai sii "next Sunday."

Before coming up with these day names I had actually suggested names for the months of the year as well, and initially really liked them too...but there was a major problem that will be very obvious:

válokuu "January" (light month)

lúmikuu "February" (snow month)

vúakuu "March" (rain month)

lúlukuu "April" (flower month)

náukuu "May" (birth month)

késakuu "June" (summer month)

kúmakuu "July" (hot month)

kócukuu "August" (fruit month)

mákekuu "September" (harvest month)

hísikuu "October" (mist month)

túlikuu "November" (wind month)

tévikuu "December" (winter month)

I still feel embarrassed that it took a friend (thanks, Kate) to point out that these names are highly specific to the northern hemisphere above a certain latitude...not exactly appropriate for a project with any pretensions to IALdom. Though I've workshopped this a bit I have yet to come up with an alternative system that feels sensible to me: whether using numbers or some kind of nominal compounds, whether semantically meaningful or not. Oh well, one of these years.