From pycyn@aol.com Mon Oct 30 16:53:58 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: Pycyn@aol.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_2_1); 31 Oct 2000 00:53:58 -0000 Received: (qmail 5787 invoked from network); 31 Oct 2000 00:53:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 31 Oct 2000 00:53:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-d06.mx.aol.com) (205.188.157.38) by mta3 with SMTP; 31 Oct 2000 00:53:57 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-d06.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v28.32.) id a.74.45e0e35 (3949) for ; Mon, 30 Oct 2000 19:53:53 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <74.45e0e35.272f7221@aol.com> Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 19:53:53 EST Subject: re: calendrical names To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com maikl has been ingenious and persistent again. But I wonder how intercultural are those metal assignments. For that matter, how well do the weekdays match the planets across cultures or the planets metals (or god types, for that matter). To be sure, the whole thing seems to have started in some Fertile Crescent place or other with the planets and the corresponding week days and the gods. But were the details or only the general ideas transmitted? (And were weeks already around from quarter lunations, and so free from the planetary/god /metal stuff altogether?) Still, it is a pretty plausible list and, for a westerner at least, a pretty natural one. Every literate culture after planetary weeks had these metals (and zinc and antimony/arsenic and maybe another but I can't think what). I'm less sure about the colored months -- and not just because I'm unsure just what magenta and cyan are. I suppose we can justify a number of orders for colors -- the spectral ones so far as they apply and black and white, with gray between, at one end or the other or overlapping the turn, for example. Anything else is probably going to make for trouble, since the associations -- whatever they are -- will be local.