Piotr asked - how is Tuesday
related to the Polish word for rain?
I would definitely like to hear the answer to this!
I haven't got very far myself. Tuesday got its name from the god whose (modern)
Swedish name is Tyr. In Old English he was Tiw
and the Old English name of this day was Tiwesdaeg (ae
should be a ligature). The idea of naming the days of the week after gods was
borrowed from Latin (sez the small dictionary where I found this), where this
was the day of the warrior god: Martis dies, and Latin borrowed
it from Greek: hemera Areos. The Old Germanic (I'm not too sure
about the proper terminology in English) name of Tiw was *Tiuz,
which is related to IE *dieus: "god" or "heaven".
But what's all this got to do with rain? The Polish
word for Tuesday, wtorek, gives no clue. It is obviously linked
to the numeral wtory, second. Perhaps deszcz,
the Polish word for rain, is related to *dieus? From "heaven"
to "rain"? But it seems far fetched.
Hakan