1745: Dominica and Dominical Letters Sep 24, 2019

'Sunday', in Romance languages like French and Spanish is 'Dimanche' and 'Domingo' respectively, which compared to English is the most different etymologically, and moreover it is the only day in French not to end in '-di'. This comes from 'dominus' meaning 'Lord' (i.e. Christ's day), but it was also very significant to the Romans. Dominical letters were a way of relating the date to the day of the week. The Roman denoted the days A-H (there were 8 days in a Roman week). In an A year, the 1st of January would be a Sunday, and so on, so knowing the dominical letter would make it easy to know what day of the week any date was. This is still used to calculate the date of Easter, but to learn how it influenced music, make sure to stay up to date tomorrow.