Days of the week in Tagalog: Lunes to Linggo, Spanish roots, spelling

Spanish names in Tagalog spelling

Six of the seven days of the week in Tagalog came from Spanish during more than three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines. Wikipedia calls them Tagalized Spanish: lunes became Lunes, martes Martes, sábado Sabado. The words kept their Spanish sound and took Tagalog spelling, which writes what it hears.

The respelling follows a few regular rules. Tagalog has no j for the Spanish sound in jueves, so Thursday is Huwebes, with h. Spanish v sounds like b, so viernes is Biyernes. The diphthongs ie and ue are written iy and uw, giving Miyerkules from miércoles and the w in Huwebes. Behind every Spanish name stands the Latin planet week, and Wiktionary traces Lunes to dies Lunae and Huwebes to dies Iovis, the day of Jupiter.

Sunday is the puzzle. Wiktionary records two explanations for Linggo. Zorc suggested in 1985 that it comes from Spanish domingo, misheard as if it contained the Tagalog infix -um-, which was then removed, with an early change from d to l. Wolff had proposed in 1976 that it came instead from Malay minggu, week, itself from Portuguese domingo. Either way the word goes back to Latin dies Dominicus, the Lord's day.

Linggo means Sunday and week

In lower case, linggo is the ordinary Tagalog word for week, with semana as a synonym. The phrase for the days of the week in Tagalog is mga araw ng linggo, literally the days of the week, and Wiktionary's list of the days opens with Linggo for that reason.

Context and the capital letter keep the two meanings apart. Sa Linggo is on Sunday; isang linggo is one week, and the derived words lingguhan, weekly, and linggo-linggo, every week, are built on the week sense.

The same word araw, which stands in the phrase above, means sun, day and date. Wiktionary lists all three senses, so araw ng Lunes is the day Monday and a question about the date can also use araw.

Capital letters and Miyerkules or Miyerkoles

Tagalog always capitalises the days of the week, unlike Spanish, which writes them in lower case. Wikipedia's Tagalog article states the rule for days and months alike. Lunes in the middle of a sentence is therefore correct in Tagalog, and lunes would be the Spanish spelling.

Wednesday has two spellings in current use. The site tables and Wikipedia write Miyerkules. Wiktionary's entry marks Miyerkules as the spelling before 2014 and gives Miyerkoles as the current form, in line with the 2014 Ortograpiyang Pambansa of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, which pushed loanwords closer to their Spanish source. Both are found in print; neither is a mistake.

For abbreviations Wiktionary records Lun., Mar., Miy., Huw., Biy., Sab. and Lin., with longer forms such as Miyer. and Biyer. as well. Colloquial speech shortens Huwebes to Webes.

How to use the days of the week in Tagalog

The marker sa turns a day into a time expression: sa Lunes, on Monday; sa Sabado, on Saturday. For a habit Tagalog uses tuwing, every time: tuwing Huwebes means every Thursday, one of Wiktionary's own examples for the word.

The days around today are native words, not Spanish ones. Ngayon is now or today, and kahapon is yesterday, which Wiktionary derives from the prefix ka- and hapon, afternoon. A date in words uses the ordinal ika- with ng, as in tuwing ika-25 ng Disyembre, every 25 December.

The church year keeps the Spanish compounds whole: Huwebes Santo is Maundy Thursday and Biyernes Santo Good Friday, both borrowed from Spanish Jueves Santo and Viernes Santo.

Tagalog or Filipino?

The names on this page are the same in Tagalog and in Filipino, and that is no coincidence. Tagalog was chosen in 1937 as the basis of the national language, which was renamed Pilipino in 1959; the 1987 Constitution names the national language Filipino. Wikipedia's article on Filipino describes it as Tagalog-based and quotes Ricardo Nolasco, a former chair of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, who called the two mutually intelligible varieties of one language.

In practice the distinction matters more for names of languages than for everyday words. A calendar printed in Manila says Lunes and Linggo whether its maker calls the language Tagalog or Filipino. Cebuano, spoken in the central Philippines, uses Spanish names too, and the days of the week in many languages list its Dominggo for Sunday where Tagalog has Linggo.