"Real world" similarities?

[Avis Noctis]

I apologize if this has been asked before -- please link me to the posts where it has.

I've noticed that there seem to be a lot of connections between our world and European languages. Are these observations legit?

Examples:
7 days the week
12 months
One day of rest, called sabato by some (Italian word for Saturday as well)
tenec - Spanish tener and it's use in age (freely admit that that could be stretching it)
(formal "you") tu - (informal Spanish) tu
(girl) frälina - (German "miss") fräulein

And are the terms human, lion, coyote, mole, etc. used for simplicity, or does Almea literally have these animals?

Thanks, and again, I apologize if this has been asked incessantly in the past.

[zompist]

For why Almea seems Earth-like, and Verduria even more so, see this page. But in brief: it's intentional; Verduria is supposed to be familiar, like most fantasy realms, and areas outside it more exotic.

There are a lot of linguistic borrowings. (Some of them I probably wouldn't do if I were starting over!)

Tu is actually a faux ami— the original word for 'thou' is le, and tu was a 3rd person singular pronoun.

12 months are actually hard to get away from! It's a nice dividable number, and something divisible by 4 fits a temperate climate very well. You could do 6 (as in ancient India) or 24 (as in China), but these aren't that different.

As for biology, the general idea is that I use the closest English term, but Almean animals are not identical to earthly ones.

[So Haleza Grise]

Rather than start a new thread, I thought I would put my question about the calendar to the end of this one.

Do the kasteni have a day of the week? If not, does that then mean that every date has either a fixed day of the week, or an incomplete list of possible days?

[zompist]

I had to go back to my college D&D folder to get a definitive answer to this one. (I made calendars to keep track of the wilderness campaigns.) And the answer is: kasten is an ordinary week day. So:

28 recoltë 3480 is a néronden
kasten is a cedhnare
1 yag is a scúreden