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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

So, for comparison - in Poland we use

- 24 hour clock

- days of the week are called "after not working day", "second day", "middle day", "fourth day", "fifth day", "sabbath", "not working day"

- months are mostly named from the agricultural/weather phenomena "wood cutting month", "strong cold month", "Mars month", "flowers month", "Mai month", "red pigment larvae month", "linden trees month", "sickle month", "heather month", "chaff month", "falling leaves month", "frozen ground month"

Dates are written dd-mm-yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd (less often).

The rest is as bad as in USA.

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> "Mars month"

I though marzec came from marznąć meaning "to freeze".

So you have the day before "seventh day" be called "fifth day"?

Week starts on Monday.

"Sabbath" comes from Hebrew for rest or cessation, not from being the seventh day.

Oh! I thought it meant “seventh”! Thanks for the correction.

> "second day"

Wtorek? That... does not appear to have "dwa" or anything similar in it. Please ELIC (explain like I'm Czech (actually am, tho lived in Poland for a bit))

There is an old Slavic word "vtorý" for "second" (not sure about spelling, but it is documented for example in old church Slavonic). Russian still uses "vtoroj" for "second". Several other Slavic languages have a word for Tuesday based on this root, even though their usual word for "second" follows a systematic derivation based on "dva" (two). Examples includes Czech and Slovak ("úterý" for Tuesday in both) and Polish ("wtorek").

You’d think old Church Slavonic to be an obscure language, but in my local church (in eastern Slovakia) you can attend a liturgy in this language twice a week.

Polish uses both "drugi" and "wtóry" for second (wtóry sounds old style, but most people understand it).

It's also still retained in words that mean "repeat(ed)" - powtórzyć, powtórny.

Wtóry is oldstyle "second" in Polish.

"Middle day" isn't the middle day?

It's the middle day of the work week.

Looks cute.

Roots of most of these words aren't instantly obvious even to Poles though - the meaning is there, but hidden behind layers of language evolution. I was aware of some of those roots already, but with some others I went like "huh, I guess this makes sense" only after reading the parent comment (although I'm not sure whether all of them are actually correct).

It was pretty obvious to me (except styczeń). But I did read Gołubiew's "Bolesław Chrobry" series that's written in Polish stylized to 10th century :)

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