Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
In English, the days of the week are named for Norse gods (or the pantheon)... All except Saturday. Sunday... The sun Monday... The moon Tuesday... Tew/Tiw, Norse god of war and justice Wednesday... Wodin (Odin), the all father Thursday... Thor, God of lightning and thunder Friday... Freyja, the lady, goddess of love.
Except Saturday. The Norse called Saturday laundry day. Laugerdagr. Great word actually....
But the English wouldn't have it so they went with the roman God Saturn for Saturday.
Lørdag is bath day. The vikings would bathe on Saturdays. Also laundry. I suspect it needed to be a tradition in order for people to get into the cold water without complaining.
The English Saturday is from latin, roman god Saturn.
And what makes this even weirder is that in the Roman languages all days are Roman Gods EXCEPT Saturday and Sunday. But there is an explanation for both these things, and it becomes quite clear when you know the days in some Latin language, e.g. in Spanish it's:
The interesting is the obvious conversion:
Wednesday should have been Hermsday for Hermod who's the God of messages equivalent to Mercury, but I think they thought it was bad not having a day for the allfather and gave him Wednesday.
What about the weekend? In Spanish (and most other roman languages) they are:
As you can see at some point Latin languages started using their new christian religion to name days, but before that those days were:
So as you can see the days of the week in English are mostly the days of the week from ancient Rome, just adapted to a different culture.
But why didn't they change Saturday and Sunday? My guess is that because the equivalent of Saturn is Freyr the name would have been too similar to his sister's day Friday. As for Sunday, in earlier Roman history the Sun wasn't an important god so Sunday might actually reference the sun and not the deity so no need to convert it. And in later periods the Sun represented Roman imperialism and centralized power so they wouldn't want that one changed. But these are just guesses from my part, if anyone knows the real reason I would love to hear it.
Very cool!