Interesting video :) for some reason it made me start thinking about the Latin alphabet itself, and how that came about. I've often wondered why the Greek alphabet "lost" to Latin considering the crazy influence that the Ancient Greeks had.
In the languages that I know the days of the week (English, German, Russian (transliterated), Finnish): Monday - Montag - Ponedelnik - Maanantai Tuesday - Dienstag - Vtornik - Tiistai Wednesday - Mittwoch - Sreda - Keskiviiko Thursday - (forgot) - Chetverk - Torstai Friday - Freitag - Piatnitsa - Perjantai Saturday - Samstag - Subbotu - Lauantai Sunday - Sonntag - Voskresenie - Sunnuntai It's amazing to see the similarities between the Indo-European languages and the Slavonic days of the week too.
I think the 7-day week is derived from the moon cycle and the 7 planets. As you said, each planet is related to hours in a day, they also extended that to days in a month. Since many early cultures realized that the Sidereal moon's cycle is closer to 28 days, it's easy to divide a 28-day month by 7 planet, to assign a planet to each week day, and give you a clean 4 weeks in a month. This whole planets are aligned to months in a year, weeks in a month, days in a week, and hours in a day thing is also very important in Ancient China, except that they divided the stars along the tropic of cancer into 28 constellations, making it easy to assign a constellation to each day. The sun and the moon is then combined with the traditional Five Agent concept (metal/Venus, wood/Jupiter, water/Mercury, fire/Mars, earth/Saturn) with the sun and the moon to give us 七曜 aka 七政, which basically the 7-day week. Although in Ancient China there's no fixed day off in a week, so the concept of week was only used by ancient astrologists, and wasn't important to the regular people.
Number play is fun, but it doesn't mean anything. A 28 day lunar month can be divided several ways, a 7 day week is not inevitable. And dividing up into lunar months is not inevitable. Other cultures had other shorter periods within the year that don't fit your hypothesis.
@@nycbearff It isn't inevitable, but the near alignment made it easy for different cultures to arrive at this 7-day week thing independently. It's even more likely that they had cultural exchanges that disseminated the concept throughout Eurasia.
The assumption that this mixing of traditions occured among Anglo-Saxons seems awfully Anglo-centric? The migrations and merger of these peoples' out of Saxony and Angeln are pretty late events in the connections between Germanic people and Romans. While the source situation on the beliefs of pre-christian Franks and Burgundians isn't the best they were linguistically and culturally similar to Angles and Saxons and entered the Roman sphere centuries earlier.
This is a worthwhile point to consider, however, the old Frankish and Burgundian languages are poorly attested (what we have is basically just a handful of uncertain words reconstructed from place names). Part of the reason for this is that their written culture became pretty much exclusively Latin by the time they established themselves in formerly Roman lands. We therefore have no evidence that they used weekdays independent of Latin Christian liturgy, let alone what they would have called them. I find it much more likely that they would have simply adopted the Latin terms as they were gradually adopting much of the rest of the Latin language during this time (keep in mind that a big portion of their kingdoms' populations were already speaking Latin natively). This isn't certain, of course, and I've tried to make that clear in the video, but the origin in England seems to be the most plausible. That being said, absence of evidence doesn't necessarily mean evidence of absence.
Very interesting, learned something new.
Thank you. I'm going to binge-watch all your stuff tomorrow; also, you gained a new subscriber!
Interesting video :) for some reason it made me start thinking about the Latin alphabet itself, and how that came about. I've often wondered why the Greek alphabet "lost" to Latin considering the crazy influence that the Ancient Greeks had.
In the languages that I know the days of the week (English, German, Russian (transliterated), Finnish):
Monday - Montag - Ponedelnik - Maanantai
Tuesday - Dienstag - Vtornik - Tiistai
Wednesday - Mittwoch - Sreda - Keskiviiko
Thursday - (forgot) - Chetverk - Torstai
Friday - Freitag - Piatnitsa - Perjantai
Saturday - Samstag - Subbotu - Lauantai
Sunday - Sonntag - Voskresenie - Sunnuntai
It's amazing to see the similarities between the Indo-European languages and the Slavonic days of the week too.
funny you forgot Thor days in German when the literal translation would be Thunders day lmao (Donnerstag)
Another very good video!
I think the 7-day week is derived from the moon cycle and the 7 planets. As you said, each planet is related to hours in a day, they also extended that to days in a month. Since many early cultures realized that the Sidereal moon's cycle is closer to 28 days, it's easy to divide a 28-day month by 7 planet, to assign a planet to each week day, and give you a clean 4 weeks in a month. This whole planets are aligned to months in a year, weeks in a month, days in a week, and hours in a day thing is also very important in Ancient China, except that they divided the stars along the tropic of cancer into 28 constellations, making it easy to assign a constellation to each day. The sun and the moon is then combined with the traditional Five Agent concept (metal/Venus, wood/Jupiter, water/Mercury, fire/Mars, earth/Saturn) with the sun and the moon to give us 七曜 aka 七政, which basically the 7-day week. Although in Ancient China there's no fixed day off in a week, so the concept of week was only used by ancient astrologists, and wasn't important to the regular people.
Number play is fun, but it doesn't mean anything. A 28 day lunar month can be divided several ways, a 7 day week is not inevitable. And dividing up into lunar months is not inevitable. Other cultures had other shorter periods within the year that don't fit your hypothesis.
@@nycbearff It isn't inevitable, but the near alignment made it easy for different cultures to arrive at this 7-day week thing independently. It's even more likely that they had cultural exchanges that disseminated the concept throughout Eurasia.
Really interesting thank you
The assumption that this mixing of traditions occured among Anglo-Saxons seems awfully Anglo-centric?
The migrations and merger of these peoples' out of Saxony and Angeln are pretty late events in the connections between Germanic people and Romans.
While the source situation on the beliefs of pre-christian Franks and Burgundians isn't the best they were linguistically and culturally similar to Angles and Saxons and entered the Roman sphere centuries earlier.
This is a worthwhile point to consider, however, the old Frankish and Burgundian languages are poorly attested (what we have is basically just a handful of uncertain words reconstructed from place names). Part of the reason for this is that their written culture became pretty much exclusively Latin by the time they established themselves in formerly Roman lands. We therefore have no evidence that they used weekdays independent of Latin Christian liturgy, let alone what they would have called them. I find it much more likely that they would have simply adopted the Latin terms as they were gradually adopting much of the rest of the Latin language during this time (keep in mind that a big portion of their kingdoms' populations were already speaking Latin natively).
This isn't certain, of course, and I've tried to make that clear in the video, but the origin in England seems to be the most plausible. That being said, absence of evidence doesn't necessarily mean evidence of absence.
Scandinavian weekdays are identical to the old English ones, apart from Saturday(Latin) being laurdag (wash/laundry/housekeeping day)
I disagree, its clearly named after Thor.