From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: [week] Re: Weekdays in other languages (was: ... Latin?)
Date: 16 Nov 92 23:43:05 GMT
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU

In article <1992Nov14.145924.29824@odin.diku.dk>, thorinn@diku (Lars Henrik Mathiesen) writes:
>alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>
>>That's why the Germanic names are as they are.  For example, in
>>English we have the reflexes of the following:
>
>>	dies solis	sun-day
>>	dies lunae	moon-day
>>	dies martis	Tiu's-day (god's name cognate with Latin deus, Skt.
>>				dyaus)
>>	dies mercurii	Woden's-day (outside Scandinavia, Woden was the
>>				conductor of souls to the land of the dead,
>>				like Mercury)
>>	dies jovis	Thor's-day
>>	dies veneris	Frija's-day (goddess of love, Norse Frigga)
>>	dies saturni	Saturn's-day (so they didn't have an equivalent--so
>>				what?)
>
>I have read that Tiu (Norse Tir, Got. Tiwaz), while strongly related
>to Latin deus, is actually cognate to Gr. Zeus, Lat. Jovis; the
>difference in PIE being something like *dyau- vs.  *diw- (which
>probably means that Skt. dyaus belongs to the Zeus class). Is this
>wrong? (Of course, in the Germanic version, Tir is no longer a
>father-god, but a war-god, the same role as the Roman Mars.)

Different ablaut grades of the same stem:

	*dye:us
	*deiwos
	*diwos

Tiwaz/Tyr/Tiu is cognate *in form* with Latin divus "divine"; please excuse the
"loose" terminology--historical linguistics frequently speak of words being
cognate when they mean that they derive from *related*, not necessarily
*identical*, ancestral forms.

Among the Goths, Tiwaz was still the chief god.

Zeus is cognate with Sanskrit dyaus, and the initial element Iu- in Iuppiter,
which has been discussed on this newsgroup before.

>Is it known when/how this equation between Germanic and Roman gods was
>established? I seem to remember that Tacitus mentioned some Germanic
>gods as equivalents of Romans ones --- did these survive in Roman
>culture and get applied by missionaries, or was the concept of weeks
>and weekdays perhaps borrowed earlier, through trade and returning
>mercenaries?

The Romans followed the Greeks in equating other peoples' gods with their own.
For example, Ovid's story of the metamorphosis of Io ends with her in Egypt--
where he equated her with the Egyptian Isis.  He doubtless was *not* being
original in this equation.

>Among the Germanic languages, the pattern is quite consistent.
>Saturday has some variation: Scandinavian (No,Sw,Da) has variations on
>lo/rdag, which originally meant washing day, while German has
>Sonnabend (sun's night) or Samstag (which I have seen derived from
>something other that Saturn) --- perhaps that untranslated Roman name
>was too hard to remember.
>
>Also, German, and I believe Icelandic, have replaced Wotan's day with
>Mittwoch (middle [of] week). I have read that the Christian church did
>that to avoid the memory of the old faith, but on the other hand I
>have the impression that Thor was the most worshipped of the old gods
>at the time of conversion in Scandinavia and Iceland --- and if Wotan
>wasn't the head god in Germany, why did he get suppressed there?

Thor was more worshipped by the Norwegian and Icelanders; Odin was more
important among the Swedes.  I don't recall which was more important among the
Danes at the time.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
Newsgroups: sci.lang