That's really interesting. As an (ex) student of Religious Studies I'm really interested in how religious and cultural meanings from across cultures can interwind and form something new. I guess what we see here is the linguistic manifestation of it.

Recently I was thinking of this because of how Easter here in Spain is so different to Easter in the UK. In the UK it's very much a thinly veiled pagan festival mostly involving chocolate eggs, baby lambs and general celebrations of fertility (if you've endured winter in the UK you'll know why we celebrate Spring) . Here in Spain its all a bit more Christian (and Catholic) with saints, weeping statues and processions of people wearing pointy hats. 

thanks for the pic

That also goes to show how arbitrary symbols and costumes can be, since in America, those would look like members of the KKK which did a lot of racist damage.  It's all a matter of how we look at it.

The costumes also have the same connotations in Europe. They were also the costumes of the Spanish Inquisition, who in their time were just as damaging and evil as the KKK.

Although, I and probably anyone else who has seen the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch, can not possibly take these costumes seriously anymore.

In the next article I'm going to write about how symbols and words have been changed and now can have negative connotations. 

actually, as funny as it sounds, Japanese took it's names for days of the week from latin as well (through chinese). ;P

have a look here! :)

also, you can find more information on the days of the week in other languages (including western ones ;P) here :)

The norwegian word for saturday comes from the old norse words laug = bath and dagr = day since it was a norse tradition to wash themselves on saturdays. So it's not related to Lord's Day or christianity at all.

/Moe

Interesting to note the days of the week in Thai also have astronomical origin as show in the Latin table above. I would be fascinated to know how this came about. I know around the turn of the 20th century Thailand had a massive civilization/westernization campaign where things such as surnames, suits, bowler hats were introduced into society and endorsed by the Monarchy.

This was part of a grander strategy of avoiding colonization by appearing more cilivilized (i.e. westernised) than their neighbors. Perhaps the names of the days of the week modified then? Anyone have any ideas?

Note: The colours are the traditional Thai birthday colours.

(Pinched from the wikipedia article for convenience)

Thanks, I changed it now, based on the research I did to confirm what you wrote.  I had originally made an educated guess but it makes sense that way too.