English names of days are weird. You have the day of the sun and the moon, ok. Fine. Then Tuesday - Friday are norse gods (Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya), but what’s Saturday doing there?! Saturn is a completely different pantheon!
In Czech we have it simple - Monday is “after Sunday”, then there’s Secondday, Middleday, Fourthday, Fifthday, Sabbath and Not-working-day.
The Norse called Saturday “Laugerdagr” which translates to washing day/laundry day. They apparently thought doing the wash was equal to worship of their gods. Which, I don’t totally disagree. (Cleanliness is next to godliness)
The church wasn’t having that though… So they went with the roman God of time. Saturn.
It’s funny how I was learning Brazilian Portuguese and the days of the week are like Sábado (Saturday), Domingo (Sunday), but then everything starts becoming “days of the fair”, segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira…
And I, an English speaker, have the gall to still find this confusing when it comes to intuitively using non-weekends.
Like “BuT wHiCh DaY iS tHoR’s DaY?!” Asks the Californian who’s never been a Norseman to their knowledge 😂
The Japanese do it cooler. They’ve got sun, moon, and their classical elements. This can be a fun little rabbit hole when trying to understand machine translated business documents
My understanding, though it could be mistaken because I am not a scholar, is that the Germanic peoples were going through and replacing the Roman gods with Norse equivalents. But then they got to Saturn and were like “Hmm, there’s not really a good 1-to-1 match here, so I guess he stays”
English names of days are weird. You have the day of the sun and the moon, ok. Fine. Then Tuesday - Friday are norse gods (Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya), but what’s Saturday doing there?! Saturn is a completely different pantheon!
In Czech we have it simple - Monday is “after Sunday”, then there’s Secondday, Middleday, Fourthday, Fifthday, Sabbath and Not-working-day.
The Norse called Saturday “Laugerdagr” which translates to washing day/laundry day. They apparently thought doing the wash was equal to worship of their gods. Which, I don’t totally disagree. (Cleanliness is next to godliness)
The church wasn’t having that though… So they went with the roman God of time. Saturn.
It’s funny how I was learning Brazilian Portuguese and the days of the week are like Sábado (Saturday), Domingo (Sunday), but then everything starts becoming “days of the fair”, segunda-feira, terça-feira, quarta-feira, quinta-feira, sexta-feira…
And I, an English speaker, have the gall to still find this confusing when it comes to intuitively using non-weekends.
Like “BuT wHiCh DaY iS tHoR’s DaY?!” Asks the Californian who’s never been a Norseman to their knowledge 😂
The Japanese do it cooler. They’ve got sun, moon, and their classical elements. This can be a fun little rabbit hole when trying to understand machine translated business documents
My understanding, though it could be mistaken because I am not a scholar, is that the Germanic peoples were going through and replacing the Roman gods with Norse equivalents. But then they got to Saturn and were like “Hmm, there’s not really a good 1-to-1 match here, so I guess he stays”
That might be fully untrue though. 😅