Days of the Week in Vietnamese: the Liturgical Calendar of the Catholic Church

On the surface, Vietnamese seems very similar to Chinese. Each day of the week is assigned a number.

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
V full form	chủ nhật, chúa nhật	ngày thứ hai	ngày thứ ba	ngày thứ tư	ngày thứ năm	ngày thứ sáu	ngày thứ bảy
V short form	chủ nhật, chúa nhật	thứ hai	thứ ba	thứ tư	thứ năm	thứ sáu	thứ bảy
Meaning	Main day, Lord day	(day) no. 2	(day) no. 3	(day) no. 4	(day) no. 5	(day) no. 6	(day) no. 7

The word thứ is an ordinal meaning 'number'. The full forms of the names of the days include the word ngày ('day'), but in everyday language the ngày is dropped.

Despite the superficial similarity to the Chinese names, there are two important differences:

1. Sunday is identified as the 'Lord's Day' (chúa nhật) or 'master's day, main day' (chủ nhật), not as the 'day of worship' as in Chinese 禮拜天 / 礼拜天 lǐbàitiān.

2. Unlike Chinese, which takes Monday as day one, Vietnamese starts the rest of the week with No. 2 (Monday) and proceeds to No. 7 (Saturday),

In our search to find out the origins of the Vietnamese usage, our first clue is the two words for Sunday, (chúa nhật / chủ nhật). In the days when Vietnamese was still written in Chinese characters, both of these words were written with the characters 主日, meaning 'principal day', 'main day', or 'Lord's Day'. 主日, pronounced zhǔrì in Chinese and shujitsu in Japanese, has traditionally been used by Catholics in both China and Japan as a name for Sunday.

Even more interesting is the Chinese Catholic naming that follows the same numbering pattern as Vietnamese, with the 'Lord's Day' followed by 'day two' etc.

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Ch. orthography	主日	瞻禮二	瞻禮三	瞻禮四	瞻禮五	瞻禮六	瞻禮七
Mandarin pronunciation	zhǔrì	zhānlǐ-èr	zhānlǐ-sān	zhānlǐ-sì	zhānlǐ-wǔ	zhānlǐ-liù	zhānlǐ-qī
Meaning	Lord day	Observe-ritual two	Observe-ritual three	Observe-ritual four	Observe-ritual five	Observe-ritual six	Observe-ritual seven

This curious usage is actually a faithful reflection of the liturgical week of the Roman Catholic Church, which takes Sunday as the 'Lord's Day' and uses the term feria for the weekdays. The term feria originally meant 'free days' in Latin, but later came to mean 'feast days'. Then, for some unknown reason, the term feria came to be applied to the days of the week, even though these are not actually 'feast days' at all (Note 11: The feria).

As it happens, there is one language in Europe that has an almost identical method of naming the days of the week, and that is Portuguese. The Portuguese days of the week are called feira, with Monday as the second feira, Tuesday as the third, etc. The word feira can also be omitted, thus segunda for Monday, terça for Tuesday, etc. The only point of difference from Vietnamese is that Portuguese uses sábado for Saturday.

	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Portuguese	domingo	segunda-feira	terça-feira	quarta-feira	quinta-feira	sexta-feira	sábado
Meaning	Lord	2nd feria	3rd feria	4th feria	5th feria	6th feria	Sabbath

The Portuguese term feira and the Chinese term 瞻禮 zhānlǐ thus both faithfully preserve the feria of Catholic usage. Portuguese was the only European language to adopt the liturgical names instead of the planetary names or pagan god names adopted by other languages (see Days of the Week in the West).

There is, in fact, a clear historical link supporting a Portuguese origin for the Vietnamese day names. It was Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the early 17th century who played a prominent role in the development of the Vietnamese language. Portuguese missionaries edited the first bilingual dictionaries between Vietnamese and Western languages (Portuguese-Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Portuguese). Portuguese missionaries created the romanised script that later became the basis of the modern Vietnamese orthography, quoc ngu, starting the process by which the Chinese stranglehold on the Vietnamese language and culture was broken (Note 12: Portuguese missionaries and their influence on Vietnamese).

It therefore seems highly plausible that the names of the days of the week entered Vietnamese from Portuguese. Interestingly, the compiler of the first extant Vietnamese-Portuguese dictionary, Alexandre de Rhodes -- actually a French Jesuit building on the work of Portuguese Jesuits -- also wrote one of the earliest catechisms in Vietnamese. This catechism was based on a sequence of eight days, each day beginning with ngày thứ ('day number'), as in the modern names of the days of the week.

As we noticed above, Vietnamese has two variants for 'Sunday', chủ nhật and chúa nhật -- three if the alternative Southern pronunciation chúa nhựt is included. In fact, the original name for 'Sunday' was chúa nhật, 'Lord's Day', but this has largely been supplanted by chủ nhật in modern-day usage. The reason for this again lies in religion.

Under chu nom, the old system of Vietnamese writing that was based on Chinese characters, the character 主 ('main, principal, master') had two readings: chúa and chủ. These were both originally from the same Chinese root 主, but chúa is a more naturalised (and probably older) form while chủ is more recent and thus closer to the Chinese. There is a not-so-subtle difference between them:

Chúa has the meaning 'master, boss; lord, prince; God'.
Chủ has a range of meanings: 'owner, master, boss, lord, ruler, host; main, chief, principal'. These are similar to the Chinese meaning of 主 zhǔ.

Since the day names were probably introduced by the Jesuits, the original choice of chúa nhật was well motivated. Chúa refers explicitly to 'God', in particular the God of the Catholic Church. Chúa nhật is unmistakably the 'Lord's Day'.

For adherents of Eastern religions such as Buddhism, the reference to the God of the Christians was not so welcome. The solution? By reading the character 主 as chủ ('principal') instead of chúa ('Lord'), it was possible to play down the religious overtones of the name. Chúa nhật thus became chủ nhật, which has become the more common Vietnamese term for 'Sunday'. (Thanks to Nghiem Lang Thai for bringing this to my attention).

The Vietnamese system of naming the days of the week fits in perfectly with the traditional Western notion of Sunday as the first day of the week. Unfortunately for Portuguese and Vietnamese, however, the international trend is now to make Monday the first day of the week (Note 1: Is Monday the first day?). The International Standards Organisation (ISO) specifies that the week begins with Monday, a usage that is becoming more widespread, for instance in airline timetables. One recent Vietnamese dictionary (the Tư Điển Tiểng Việt), even goes out of its way to point out that thứ ba, the 'third day' or Tuesday, is really only the second day of the week!

The Vietnamese word for 'week' is tuần, short for tuần lễ, which means a 'period/cycle of religious rites'. The word tuần is derived from Chinese (旬 Mandarin: xún), which refers to a period of ten days, not seven. The 旬 was common in China until the advent of the Western-style week and is still popularly used as a sub-division of the month. In Vietnamese, tuần has lost its original meaning of 'a ten-day cycle', except in expressions like thượng tuần, meaning 'the first ten days of the month' (Note 13: 'Xun' and 'tuan', false friends).

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