Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
Why is our week composed of seven days and not, say, five days or ten? The ancient Hebrew answer is that God spent six days creating heaven, the earth, and all living things, and then rested on the seventh day, the Sabbath. If that is true, then God in his infinite wisdom also took care to create exactly seven planets, so that each planet could lend its name to a day of the week. The Babylonians, who had a culture older than the records of the Hebrews, already had a seven-day week, and they named each day and each planet after seven of their many gods: Shamash, Sin, Nergal, and the rest. The Greeks followed suit with Helios, Selene, Ares, and their fellow Olympians, and then the Romans did the same with their gods. Rome’s influence was deep and wide, so today in most of the languages of Europe the god-planets give their names to the days of the week.
You might be puzzled over what I mean by the seven planets. A “planet,” in ancient times, was not a large sphere that revolves around the sun, but one of the seven bright objects in the sky that move against the myriad of fixed stars as they all go around the earth. These were the “wandering stars”; “planet” is from the Greek word for “wander.” Two of these bright bodies were much larger and brighter than the others: the sun and the moon. When the sun is up, of course, we cannot see the stars, but at its rising or setting we can see where it stands as it follows its yearly path through the unchanging constellations. The earth was not a planet. It was the center of the cosmos and all the stars and the seven planets revolved around it. Just about everyone in the west, at least, believed in this model until Copernicus in the sixteenth century.
The nearest planet to us was the Moon (Latin Luna), then Mercury, Venus, the Sun (Sol), Mars, Jupiter (or Jove), and Saturn. The names of the days do not follow this order, but they are not random either; there is a formula that has to do with the fact that the 24 hours of the day were also named after the planets, but I’ll spare you the details. When we look at this list we see only three that name one of our days: Sun for Sunday, Moon for Monday, and Saturn for Saturday. We get the other four from gods in the Germanic pantheon. These details are interesting.
Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are named after the Old English gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor. Tuesday is Tiw’s day, and he, as the god of war, corresponds to Mars, and Mars is the god the Romans chose for their Tuesday: Martis dies, which we see clearly enough in its daughter languages Italian martedi, French mardi, Spanish martes, etc. Wednesday is Woden’s day, and he, as the god of eloquence and swiftness, corrersponds to Mercury; Wednesday in Latin is Mercurii dies, whence Italian mercoledi, French mercredi, Spanish miercoles, etc. Thursday is Thor’s day, and he, as the god of thunder and lightning, corresponds to Jupiter, or Jove for short; Thursday in Latin is Jovis dies, whence Italian giovedi, French jeudi, Spanish jueves, etc. Thor was also called Thunnar (thunder), so Thursday may come directly from Thunnar’s day; in German Thursday is Donnerstag; but in Old Norse, which influenced Old English, it is Thorsdagr.
These three days in English preserve the possessive s after the god-name: the day is his day (the same s is in his). But the other four day-names lack the s. Why? If you have ever worried about this inconsistency, I salute your curious mind. Take Friday: it is named after the goddess Frigg (or Freya), which seems to mean “wife” but comes from a root meaning “beloved.” Her name is a feminine noun, of course, and feminine nouns in Old English usually did not use the possessive s: Friday is her day (no s in “her”). She corresponds to Venus, the goddess of love. Friday in Latin was Veneris dies, whence Italian venerdi, French vendredi, Spanish viernes, etc.
The god of Saturday we took directly from Latin Saturnus, the father of Jove. In fact the oldest form of then name in Old English was Saeternesdaeg. The s dropped out long ago, perhaps because the original form was a bit of a mouthful. Sunday and Monday, which you might think, if you ever thought about this question, should be Sunsday and Monsday, lack the possessive s because they belong to a noun-class where the possessive ending was not an s, but an n. I hope that is clear enough; if not, you can feel grateful that Modern English has swept away all the complicated classes of nouns in Old English, all three noun genders, and all five case endings except one of those used for the possessive (or genitive) case.
It is interesting to learn that Wednesday, which corresponds to Middle Low German Wodenesdach and Old Norse Othensdagr, has no equivalent name in Modern German. Instead, Germans call it Mittwoch or “midweek”; the Icelanders, too, call it mithvikudagur. In other words, Hump Day. Wotan has long been expelled from the German week, and Othen from the Icelandic. That may be just as well, as Wotan/Othen was also the god of fury, and the Nazis had a thing about him.
Not everyone has had seven-day weeks. Some Greek cities had a ten-day week and the Romans had an eight-day week, before they were both replaced with the week we know. For a few years the French Revolutionary government instituted a ten-day week, with the tenth day, the décadi, set aside for ceremonies. Needless to say, it was unpopular, not least because it offered only 36 days of rest each year rather than 52. It was a way to extract more labor, and was soon abolished.
Many European languages have replaced Sunday and Saturday with names that mean “Lord’s Day” or “Sabbath,” but a few have gotten rid of their pagan day-names altogether. Even in Greece now, after “Lord’s Day,” the days are numbered—Monday is “Second Day,” Tuesday is “Third Day,” until Friday, which is the “Preparation Day” for Saturday, the “Sabbath.” In Portugal there is a similar system. Since every day already has a month number, I think it is excessively mathematical to number most of the week days as well. Give me a pagan god any week day! Especially Frigg.
Wikipedia has a list of days of the week in a very large number of languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week.
I am happy to hear from readers with comments or questions: mferber@unh.edu.
If you would like a small treatise I have written called Astronomy for English Majors, let me know.