this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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I believe most weekday names as we know them in English and many other northern European languages derive from the vikings.
Monday = Moon day. In Spanish, it's "lunes".
Well, the question is not about the origin and sequence of weekday names, but about the first day in history of uninterrupted count of 7-day cycles which leads to today’s state of the week. Added this to the post.
7 days is about how long a lunar "phase" is. A full lunar cycle is 28 days and there are 4 phases. Counting 7-day cycles is older than history. Counting moons (28-day cycles) is older than history.
Here is the problem, because actual lunar cycle is 29.5 days long, so if we simply count its phases with whole 7 days it will quickly run out of sync. Therefore Babylonians and other ancient folks added a couple of 'out-of-week' days every now an then to compensate the difference.
The moon has been around a long long time. Everyone figured that out long before recorded history. Every culture dealt with it differently. Each phase was 7.4 days long. So each phase was countable as a 7 day week but an adjustment day is needed somewhere. It could be every 2 weeks, it could be end of the month, whatever. But the 7 days comes from the amount of time it takes to go from one visible lunar phase to another.
I'm not arguing with that, but my question is different: where in history is the exact reference point (day) of today's weekday countdown? From when have people decided to stop adding or subtracting adjustment days and kept counting till today? The might have been some shifts along the way, but there should be a point exactly N x 7 days ago from which the 7-day countdown has not been interrupted. Or at least the earliest known day in history that everyone on Earth agreed upon as a reference point.
You have to go back on a per-calendar basis. The Chinese calendar will have a different answer to this question than the European calendar, for example. It is likely that different calendar systems came up with continuous 7-day cycles at different times and in different cultures without referring to each other, because the 7-day cycle maps to their shared observations of the moon cycles.
Saturday is Saturn's Day
"Saturday" references to the planet "Saturn".
Here is a video about the origin of the weekday's names in different languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifimOF5a_U
I addition to that, here is a video which explains how the months got their names: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9iOt48bTw4&list=PL5x1QB-VRuDtHCWcuSx0DgJr2mnuNXkSB&index=4 This channel has very interesting videos about the ethymological origins of different things. It's worth watching.
Edit: spelling
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=gifimOF5a_U
https://piped.video/watch?v=Y9iOt48bTw4&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I believe the Vikings adapted them from the Romans. The Greeks and Romans also had a day for the Sun and a day for the a Moon. They obviously never changed the Month from their Latin roots. July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus.
Don't know about Saturday, but "lørdag" comes from the Norse word for "washing day" because the vikings were surprisingly hygienic for their time, and bathed/washed themselves once a week.
Saturday in nordic languages Lördag/lørdag is simply lögardagen, the day in the week when you took a bath.