The Hidden Planets in Your Week

The Greeks later called them planetai, which means wanderers.

A month of the Moon is about twenty-nine and a half days, not twenty-eight.

The Jewish calendar has counted it for well over two thousand years, ending each week with the Sabbath, a day of rest.

Astrologers believed that each hour of the day was ruled by one of the seven planets, in that fixed order.

The order of our week is a happy accident of arithmetic.

You are using a count that has passed, unbroken, through Babylon, Rome and Kyoto.

“Take X” means “Let's use X as an example.” It is a quick way to start an explanation.

Take Friday.

“too” at the end of a sentence means “also”. “That means …” explains what a word stands for.

That means the day of Venus, too.

be + past participle (are spoken) puts the language first, not the speakers. “X apart” gives the distance between things.

These three languages are spoken thousands of kilometres apart, by people with very different histories.

“And yet” = “but, surprisingly”. It is stronger than “but” and introduces something unexpected.

And yet, on the same day, they all point to the same planet.

“Nobody” already makes the sentence negative, so the verb stays positive: not “Nobody didn't vote”.

Nobody voted for this.

When “who” is the subject, there is no “did”: “Who decided …?”, not “Who did decide …?”.

So who decided that a week has seven days?

“that you can check” describes “maths”. “yourself” adds “without help from anyone”.

The answer starts with seven lights in the night sky, and one small piece of maths that you can check yourself.

“what” = “the place that”. We use it for places whose names or borders have changed.

More than three thousand years ago, people in Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq, watched the night sky very closely.

noun + after + noun means it happens again and again, without a break (day after day, year after year).

Most stars stayed in the same patterns, night after night.

After a comma, “which” adds extra information about the word before it. You cannot use “that” here.

The Greeks later called them planetai, which means wanderers.

A natural way to point to an origin. The preposition “from” goes to the end of the sentence.

That is where our word planet comes from.

“give somebody something” has two objects. “a reason to + verb” = a reason for doing it.

The Moon gave people a second reason to like the number seven.

were + past participle. We don't know or care who avoided them, so the activities are the subject.

On those days, certain activities were avoided.

“must” has no past form, so we use “had to” for a past obligation or necessity.

So this kind of week had to start again with every new moon.

= “whatever”. The clause after it keeps normal word order: “what the Moon is doing”.

It simply keeps counting, seven, seven, seven, no matter what the Moon is doing.

It started in the past and is still true now. “well over” = “much more than”.

The Jewish calendar has counted it for well over two thousand years, ending each week with the Sabbath, a day of rest.

“-ing” after a comma adds what happens at the same time: “and it ends each week with …”.

The Jewish calendar has counted it for well over two thousand years, ending each week with the Sabbath, a day of rest.

“the one (that) they believed was farthest” = “the one that, they believed, was farthest”. Note: no “that” and no “it”.

Ancient astronomers put the seven lights in order, from the one they believed was farthest from Earth to the nearest.

Adverb + verb + subject: “Then came X” instead of “Then X came”. It is common in lists and stories.

Then came Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus and Mercury.

verb + around = move in no clear order. Here: the planets are not in a simple line.

It jumps around.

write down → was written down. “by” names who did it.

The answer was written down by a Roman historian, Cassius Dio, about eighteen hundred years ago.

“one of the seven planets” takes a plural noun but means a single one.

Astrologers believed that each hour of the day was ruled by one of the seven planets, in that fixed order.

Informal imperative to set up an example: “Say X happens” = “Imagine that X happens”.

Say the first hour of a day belongs to Saturn.

“A goes into B n times” = B ÷ A. “with + noun + past participle” describes a result.

Seven goes into twenty-four three times, with three left over.

to get the name of someone or something. “that ruled its first hour” tells us which planet.

And each day was named after the planet that ruled its first hour.

“Do X, and Y happens” = “If you do X, Y happens.”

Do it again, and the next day starts with the Moon.

number + noun + -ed, joined by a hyphen. The noun stays singular: seven-pointed, not seven-points.

Draw it on a circle, and the jumps make a seven-pointed star.

order / tell / ask somebody to do something.

In the year three twenty-one, Emperor Constantine ordered courts and workshops to rest on the day of the Sun: Sunday.

give A and take B instead. “their own” = their own gods.

When the week reached northern Europe, Germanic peoples swapped some of the Roman gods for their own.

“where to look” = “where you should look”. Also: how to do, what to say.

So English still hides all seven planets, if you know where to look.

For emphasis, spoken English often drops the verb: “(They are the) same planets, (in the) same order.”

Same planets, same order.

“X says …” shows where a claim comes from, without saying it is certainly true.

Japanese tradition says the monk Kukai brought it from China to Japan in the year eight hundred and six.

“That's why” = “For this reason”. “read” here means “is written as”.

That's why the Japanese week reads: sun, moon, fire, water, wood, metal, earth.

had + past participle shows it was already finished before that point in the past.

By eighteen-oh-six, France had gone back to the old calendar.

“rarely” = “almost never”. It goes before the main verb.

Family members often had different days off and rarely rested together.

“the one” = “the only”. The preposition of “ask for” stays at the end of the clause.

The week is the one unit of time that nature never asked for.

“unbroken” between commas describes how it passed: without any break.

You are using a count that has passed, unbroken, through Babylon, Rome and Kyoto.

“every one of the hours” takes a plural noun but a singular verb: in the present it would be “every one of them has …”.

And every one of its twenty-four hours once had a planet.

After “enjoy” we use -ing, not to-infinitive: enjoy learning, not enjoy to learn.

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After before / after / when, we use the present for a future time: “before you go”, not “before you will go”.

And before you go, here is a small task.

Inside a sentence, the question keeps normal word order: “which planet gives …”, not “which planet does give …”.

Find out which planet gives today its name in your language.