Re-Naming the Days of the Week

[pne]

I just read:

In a well-designed language, the Day-of-Week names would be of equal length and in alphabetical order, starting with Monday (but giving other days an additional earlier name for use in locations where the week starts too soon). They would start with different three-, two-, and one-letter abbreviations.

The month names would be also be of equal length and in alphabetical order, with distinct abbreviations.

A cute idea. Perhaps I should implement that in a conlang/conworld some day.

Comments

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"the Day-of-Week names would be of equal length"

I doubt whether this would be an advantage. Perhaps it would make reading month names quickly more difficult.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I doubt whether this would be an advantage.

It would be for computerised output (or even type-written forms), since you could allot a specific number of characters for the date and it would always be enough, whether weekday or month names are long ("Wednesday", "September") or short ("Monday", "May"). And weekday/month names would line up well in tabular lists.

Perhaps it would make reading month names quickly more difficult.

I'm not sure how much the length helps in quickly scanning month names. Plus, as you implicitly say, weekday names aren't as variable in length in English anyway.

And besides, in the proposed scheme, weekday and month names would be unique in the first character, so just seeing, say, a month name starting with a capital "E" you would know immediately that it's Elgrandember (rather than having to guess whether "J" stands for January, June, or July).

[conuly]

Wouldn't it be just as simple to have the day-of-the-week names go by number, so you could refer to them with one character - 1, 2, 3 and so on? Maybe 1d to distinguish between 1m (the first month) or whatever.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I suppose so -- Chinese does this almost completely, for example (Sun-Day is followed by 1-Day, 2-Day, 3-Day, 4-Day, 5-Day, and 6-Day, and the months are 1-Month till 12-Month).