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I know in Chinese, the days in a week from Monday to Sunday are called 星期一, 星期二, ..., 星期六, 星期日, which are verbatim translated as weekday one (or 1st weekday), weekday two (or 2nd weekday), ..., weekday six (or 6th weekday), however, not weekday seven (or 7th weekday) but weekday sun. Similarly, the twelve months from January to December are called 一月, ..., 十二月, which are 1st month, ..., 12th month.
I wonder is there any other language naming the days and months by number like Chinese?
The seven-day week is first attested in about the first century BC, in two different forms: the planetary week (where each day is associated with one of the seven visible planets) and the numbered week (where most of the days have the names of numbers, beginning with 1 = Sunday). The planetary week is first attested in Rome, while the numbered week appears to be a Jewish invention, later adopted by Christians. Some modern languages (like English) use a form of the planetary names, others a form of the numbered week (e.g. Portuguese, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian etc.). The Chinese names for the days of the week are a modern innovation.
On the other hand, the numbering of the twelve months of the lunar calendar is an ancient Chinese tradition, continued by the present-day use of numbers for the Gregorian months.
Portuguese uses ordinal numbers to number five of the seven days of the week.
Feira coincides with the term for fair, not the fair of fairy tales, but the fair that is an open-air market. But this is a distortion of the féria word, which means holiday.
English name — Portuguese name — Portuguese name using ordinal digits — Literal English meaning — Ecclesiastical Latin name
Note: terça is a shorthand used only in this context for terceira, the feminine for third .
These were not the names of the days in Old Portuguese, as Wikipedia Page on days of week says:
Saint Martin of Dumio (c. 520–580), archbishop of Braga, decided not to call days by pagan gods and to use ecclesiastic terminology to designate them. This may be the origin of the present Portuguese numbered system. Martin also tried to replace the names of the planets, but was not successful. In the Middle Ages, Galician-Portuguese retained both systems. The Roman gods' names are still used in Galician.
Korean and Japanese has inherited the method of numbering months from Chinese, but use a different enumeration for days of the week: 日月火水木金土.
Greek is using numbering as well for 4 out of 7 days. Those are:
However, there is no numbering for months.
In Hebrew, the weekdays are called:
That is, Sunday is literally "First day" and all the days follow from there. Saturday is "Day of rest".
Swahili uses numbering for Saturday (Jumamosi, weekday one) through Wednesday (Jumatano, weekday five). The word "juma" by itself means week. Its names for Thursday (Alhamisi) and Friday (Ijumaa) are derived from Arabic.
Latvian language names weekdays as Monday - 'first-day' (pirmdiena), Tuesday - 'second-day' (otrdiena) etc except for Sunday which is named svētdiena, literally 'holy-day'.
Slavic languages also have some (not all) weekday names derived from numbers - for example, in Russian Tuesday / Вторник is derived from второй (second), Thursday / четверг from четыре (four); according to wikipedia it occurs in other slavic languages as well - Slovak, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, etc.
Note also the gap between this pattern and some other languages (like the Portuguese example) that would start numbering from the Sunday instead - the start of the week is not an arbitrary choice if weekday names literally refer to their numbers.
Vietnamese uses numbers for both months and weekdays
January: Tháng 1
February: Tháng 2
...
December: Tháng 12
For weekdays
Monday → Thứ hai (2nd day of week)
Tuesday → Thứ ba (3rd day of week)
Wednesday → Thứ tư (4th day of week)
Thursday → Thứ năm (5th day of week)
Friday → Thứ sáu (6th day of week)
Saturday → Thứ bảy (7th day of week)
Sunday → Chủ Nhật (Lord's day)
However, albeit the name, it should be noted that in Vietnam Monday is the start of week, and there is a song about that which everyone should learn from kindergarten, too.
It was said that this possibly originated from Portuguese when the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries came to Vietnam and created an alphabet based on Latin characters for Vietnamese.
Some other examples are the Mongolian, and Buryat languages, which use 2 systems for day of week names, one based on the planets and one based on ordinal numbers.
In Mongolia
Cyrillic Transliteration Rough meaning
Sunday бүтэн сайн өдөр büteŋ saiŋ ödör 'full good day' (='full holiday')
Monday нэгдэх өдөр neg dekh ödör 'first day'
Tuesday хоёрдахь өдөр khoyor dakh' ödör 'second day'
Wednesday гуравдахь өдөр gurav dakh' ödör 'third day'
Thursday дөрөвдэх өдөр döröv dekh ödör 'fourth day'
Friday тавдахь өдөр tav dakh' ödör 'fifth day'
Saturday хагас сайн өдөр khagas saiŋ ödör 'half good day' (='half holiday')
In inner Mongolia they use slightly modified names based on Chinese names
Cyrillic Transliteration Rough meaning
Sunday гарагийн өдөр garagiŋ ödör 'week day'
Monday гарагийн нэгдэх өдөр garagiŋ neg dekh ödör 'first day of the week'
Tuesday гарагийн хоёрдахь өдөр garagiŋ khoyor dakh' ödör 'second day of the week'
Wednesday гарагийн гуравдахь өдөр garagiŋ gurav dakh' ödör 'third day of the week'
Thursday гарагийн дөрөвдэх өдөр garagiŋ döröv dekh ödör 'fourth day of the week'
Friday гарагийн тавдахь өдөр garagiŋ tav dakh' ödör 'fifth day of the week'
Saturday гарагийн зургаадахь өдөр garagiŋ zurgaa dakh' ödör 'sixth day of the week'
In Buryat
Cyrillic Transliteration Rough meaning
Sunday гарагай нэгэн garagaj nägän 'one of the week'
Monday гарагай хоёр garagaj ȟojor 'two of the week'
Tuesday гарагай гурбан garagaj gurban 'three of the week'
Wednesday гарагай дүрбэн garagaj dürbän 'four of the week'
Thursday гарагай табан garagaj taban 'five of the week'
Friday гарагай зургаан garagaj zurgaan 'six of the week'
Saturday гарагай долоон garagaj doloon 'seven of the week'
Please find the traditional Mongolian texts as well as more information in the link since it's hard to paste the vertical texts here without breaking the layout
You can also read about the names of week in different languages here: Days of the Week in the West, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Mongolian
Czech names for "Thursday" and "Friday" are "Čtvrtek" and "Pátek," based on the words fourth ("čtvrtý") and fifth ("pátý"). The name for "Tuesday" is "Úterý," which I believe is based on the Russian for second, "второ́й" (not certain on this one).
As for months, Latin should qualify, with names like September, October, November and December (based on 7, 8, 9 and 10 in a year starting with March).
Standard Basque has a sort of ordering system for the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday: astelehena (week+first), asteartea (week+middle), asteazkena (week+last). The etymology of the standard names for the other weekdays is not transparent. One of several plausible etymologies for osteguna (Thursday) is bost + eguna = five+day. This implies a different numbering system (beginning with Sunday) than what is used for M-W.
In Korean, the months are referred as numbers followed by the word 월 to indicate month.
January 일월 (Month 1, or 1'st month)
February 이월
March 삼월
April 사월
May 오월
June 유월
July 칠월
August 팔월
September 구월
October 시월
November 십일월
December 십이월
Korean and Japanese both number the months exactly the same way as in Chinese. However, both Korean and Japanese have their own set of names for the days of the week, based on the Chinese characters 日、月、火、水、木、金、土 for sunday through saturday, respectively.
In colloquial Croatian, months are just called prvi mjesec ("the first month"), drugi mjesec ("the second month") and so on; they do have their proper names (siječanj, veljača...) but the proper names are more formal.
Persian uses numbers for five of the days of the week, by tagging a cardinal number onto the word for Saturday:
The word for day in Persian is 'ruz'.
In Estonian days from Monday to Thursday are numbered:
Esmaspäev - "first day"
Teisipäev - "second day"
Kolmapäev - "third day"
Neljapäev - "fourth day"
Reede - (Scandinavian origin, cf. fredag in Swedish & Norwegian)
Laupäev - (Scandinavian origin, cf. laurdag in Nynorsk)
Pühapäev - "holy day"
