Frequencies of days of week in French and Spanish

It's interesting to find that Google Ngram Viewer (GN) lists French words for the days of week in almost the same order as the Lexique Corpus (LC) [note1]:

GN: dimanche > samedi > lundi > vendredi > mardi > jeudi > mercredi
LC: dimanche > samedi > lundi > jeudi > vendredi > mardi > mercredi

I'm pleasantly surprised that the two orders match quite well; the only outlier is jeudi ("Thursday"), for reason I don't know. Note that dimanche ("Sunday") and samedi ("Saturday") are high and mercredi ("Wednesday") is low in frequency.

Now let's look at Spanish, where GN again is the data of Google Ngram Viewer, and RAE is the word frequency provided by Diccionario de la lengua española of Real Academia Española [note2]:

GN : domingo > sábado > viernes > lunes >> jueves > miércoles = martes
RAE: domingo > lunes > viernes > sábado > martes > jueves > miércoles

We see that while domingo ("Sunday") remains the most frequent and the mid-week miércoles ("Wednesday") is the least, there's not much agreement for the other days of week between these two statistical data sets.

In both French and Spanish, Sunday and to a less extent Saturday are the most talked about while the mid-week Wednesday is the least. This probably reflects a human tendency to be more verbose and garrulous when it's time to relax and less so when you have tons of work to do.
___________
[note1] The actual Lexique data I use is the lemma frequency of usage in books (column freqlemlivres in the Lexique spreadsheet), extracted and shown here.
[note2] The actual data is available here.
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on May 26, 2021 20:43
No comments have been added yet.


Learning Spanish, French, and Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics

Yong    Huang
(1) Small corrections and updates to the published book, "Learning Spanish Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics"
(2) Miscellaneous notes about the unpublished books, Learning French / Italian Words Th
...more
Follow Yong    Huang's blog with rss.