Word for Thursday in European Languages
Word for Thursday in European Languages
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The Finnish word looks oddly germanic(?) Was it affected by Swedish?
Borrowed from Old Swedish þōrsdagher, from Proto-West Germanic *Þunras dag (“day of the thunder god”).
Huh interesting, thanks!
When in doubt, always guess it’s a Swedish loanword. You’ll be right surprisingly often.
It's pretty literally just T(h)or's day. But how they turned Freya's day into perjantai is pretty baffling.
Even the german version is still close to this origin, Donnerstag is literally just Thunder's Day.
Another fun fact, while the norse pantheon is generally considered to be, well, nordic, before Christianity came they were also revered further down south by the Germanic peoples, sometimes under different names though (Odin = Wotan for example).
When naming of the DOW, the Germans followed the analogies between the pagan gods as e.g. noted by Tacitus. Mars -> Tyr, Mercurius -> Wodan/Odin, Juppiter -> Donar/Thor and Venus -> Frija/Frigg.