this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Building Solidarity - One Word at a Time

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I've been trying to come up with good names for days of the week in my conlang, and as part of that I've been looking into etymologies of days of the week in natural languages. A lot of languages have very similar etymologies for days of the week that aren't too interesting, and normally calling every day just "nth day" would be a boring etymology, but Greenlandic makes up for it by using the exact same words for days of the week as hours of the day. It never would've occurred to me that "it's two" could mean either "it's two o'clock" or "it's two s'day".

I'm also very fond of the idea of using "become a person" to mean "be born". Forced-birthers in shambles!

Here's a table of the Greenlandic days of the week:

| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday | |


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| | ataasinngorneq | marlunngorneq | pingasunngorneq | sisamanngorneq | tallimanngorneq | arfininngorneq | sapaat |

You can probably infer the etymology of sapaat.

Another word that uses -nngor featured under "quotations" on the screencapped Wiktionary page: arnaqatiminoortartunngorsimalluni ("and she became a lesbian") — {arnaq|woman}{-qatï|fellow}{-minut|to-her}{-Vr|go}{-tar|habitually}{-toq|-er}{-nngor|become}{-sima|PERFECT}{-llu|and}{-ni|herself}, more literally "and she became someone who habitually goes to fellow women"


As for "mikudagur" being Faroese for "Wednesday": the "miku" is cognate with English "midweek". So, regrettably, the Faroese didn't actually name a day of the week after commiku

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