: Re: Should I make up my own names for the days of the week/months I'm writing a light fantasy book. I think it will end up falling into the YA genre. I'm considering making my own names up

@Welton431

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I would say No for the most part. There is the question of "Why would we have a Saturday if no one's ever heard of the god, Saturn" or indeed Rasdahan's point of naming months after Roman emperors.

However, there's a known trope in writing, the "Translation Convention", which means that even though the characters in their universe aren't speaking English, it's presented to the reader in English and the reader is just not supposed to think about it too much.

Most words in English - and presumably all languages - has an etymology that is specific to our world, so days of the week or months of the year need not be any different. You'd end up translating most of the dialogue if you took all the Latin-influenced words out (for example) because Latin didn't exist in your world.

However.

Perhaps your world also has gods (or highly honoured faeries, or heroes or species of insect or something else) as part of the story or history of the world, and as part of enriching your world you want the people to have named time periods after them. As a deliberate thrust in that direction, then it would do no harm and put some depth into the world (but keep it to a minimum, you don't want the reader to have to be memorising the entire new calendar). If you're doing it for that reason, fine, but don't feel like you have to simply because "there are no Norse gods in this world, so they couldn't have a Thursday"

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