When I offered to work on translations for Greymatter, I had no idea of the interesting journey I was about to take. I've always had a latent interest in linguistics, but working on collections of specific words - in my case, days of the week and months of the year - brought my interest to the forefront.

Native speakers of English tend to drop all diacritical marks, except when they're trying to show off their three-word French vocabulary. Thus, finding words for weekdays and months that were actually correct, not Anglicized, became my driving goal.

This page would have been impossible to create without Unicode: an impressively flexible (and exhaustive!) attempt to create a truly worldwide character set. With Unicode, I can create this page without the use of graphics. Alan Wood's incredibly exhaustive Unicode site, which is available at alanwood.net/unicode/, was my crutch in identifying characters from alphabets and syllabic systems that I knew nothing about.

You will probably need two fonts to view this page. Arial Unicode MS (51,000 characters) takes care of about 90% of the languages covered on this page; Code 2000 (32,000 characters) takes care of the rest - it handles a whole bunch of really odd character sets. For IE users: once you've installed the font, go to Tools | Internet Options, and click on Fonts. Select Arial Unicode MS, and I'm betting lots of the little square boxes on this page will magically go away. For the rest of you? I haven't got a clue, sorry!

Where did I find all these listings? I've learned what phrases to search for on Google. As many languages take weekday names from astronomy, astronomy sites have proved unusually useful. After that, it's guesswork: find one page for a single day of the week with the correct diacritical marks, and more often than not you can turn up TV station radio program listings that are - you guessed it - broken down by weekdays. Newspapers and websites devoted to church parishes with immigrant congregations work as well. Many people who have emigrated to English-speaking countries will publish small pages that have a few words in their native language, and that will be enough to get me started.

I apologize if I've missed your language or made an error. I've double-checked as best I can, but the logistics are difficult at best. If I've made an error, send an email to comments at domesticat dot net, and I'll make it right.