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I note that Saturday is Shabbes but the other days are similar to German which are based on Norse mythology -- one could easily see this being a problem and that a choice to use the Hebrew words for the days have been made. Is it possible that alternate words for days of the week exist or at one time were used?

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  • Hebrew itself had no problem borrowing the Babylonian name of the month Tammuz named after a Mesopotamian deity by the same name. – alephreish Mar 15 '22 at 14:52

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The short answer is that Yiddish is a Germanic language, just one with a significant Hebrew/Aramaic adstrate. Despite many Hebrew borrowings, the majority of Yiddish vocabulary is Germanic, and in fact fairly similar to modern German (since they both derive in large part from Old High German). That's where it got these weekday names from.

The weekdays are not actually named after Germanic gods, but after the planets (*); the idea of a seven-day cycle was developed by Babylonian astronomers/astrologers, and spread from them to the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, etc, and eventually to the various Germanic and Celtic peoples in Europe. The Babylonians named the planets after their gods, and approximate equivalents were found in each culture that borrowed them. This is why the titan Kronos/Saturn gets a day, but the major god Poseidon/Neptune doesn't: Kronos was the closest equivalent the Greeks could find for the Babylonian god Ninurta. Likewise, that's why we have "Saturday" as an outlier among a bunch of Germanic names: they couldn't find any Germanic equivalent for that one, so they just used the Roman name "Saturn".

But as far as I'm aware, nobody except the Babylonians considered these day names religious; they were just a convenient method of measuring time. Many Romance languages have replaced the name of Sunday with some equivalent of "The Lord's Day", and as mentioned Yiddish replaced Saturday with Shabbath, but in general these names weren't seen as pagan: there was nothing wrong with calling it "Venus's day" (or "Friday"), because "Venus" was just the widely-used name of a planet in the night sky. (Similarly, I don't think religious authorities ever objected to alchemists calling a particular type of metal "mercury".)

(*) Specifically the seven classical "planets": the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Draconis
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    Of course, the German name for Saturday (Samstag), just like the Romance names, also comes from ‘sabbath’ rather than ‘Saturn’, so it’s not just Yiddish. Meanwhile, the Scandinavian languages opted for ‘bath day’, which reveals something about their relationship with hygiene. In fact, the Ingvaeonic and Istvaeonic languages (English, Frisian, Dutch, some forms of Low German) seem to be the only ones that have kept the Saturn reference at all. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 14 '21 at 23:08
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    Shabbat (or shabes in YIVO transliteration) is also the Hebrew number 7, so there's another day-name tradition heard from. – jlawler Feb 15 '21 at 00:28
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    That is not the short answer, @JanusBahsJacquet's comment is. – Adam Bittlingmayer Feb 15 '21 at 08:37
  • @JanusBahsJacquet the Celtic languages also retain the Saturn reference – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 10:32
  • @Tristan Oh yes, of course they do! Dé Sathairn in Irish, etc. That was a silly oversight on my part, thanks! – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 15 '21 at 10:32
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    @jlawler the Hebrew number Seven is שֶׁבַע šéva', not שַׁבָּת šabát. It's unclear if there is actually any connection between the two, but if there is, there has been substantial reanalysis as the ayin has been lost and the tav is a root letter in šabat. The other names of the days of the week are numbers in Hebrew, but šabat is not – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 10:35
  • For what it's worth, in north and east Germany you will usually encounter Sonnabend (“sun evening”), not Samstag. – René Feb 15 '21 at 11:14
  • One correction: the ancient Babylonians did not have a seven-day week. – fdb Feb 15 '21 at 12:37
  • https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/16923/how-come-every-culture-on-the-planet-has-a-different-calendar-yet-follow-the-sa – fdb Feb 15 '21 at 12:40
  • @fdb Didn't the Babylonians mark off every seventh day of a lunar cycle as significant? I remember specifically learning that there's been significant debate over whether the Jewish day of rest historically came from this (established during the Babylonian captivity) or predated it. – Draconis Feb 15 '21 at 15:12
  • @Draconis they did, but because that leaves 2 or 3 days spare at the end of each month it's unclear if this was conceived of as a cycle of 7 days (with some intercalary days), or if it was just seen as part of the monthly cycle. The association of gods to planets appears to also have been made by the Babylonians, with the Greek names being interpretationes graecae, but I've seen conflicting claims about whether the association of planets to days of a 7 week cycle is a Greek innovation or borrowed from the Babylonians – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 15:18
  • @Tristan That's fair re the cycle, and interesting, I hadn't heard about the planetary association potentially being post-Babylonian. I know some Greco-Roman sources attribute it to the Egyptians, but since so much astronomical/astrological stuff came originally from Mesopotamia (and afaik the Egyptians didn't have a tradition of seven-day weeks in the classical period) I figured that just showed a chain of borrowing. – Draconis Feb 15 '21 at 15:22
  • the fact Hebrew didn't borrow planetary days of the week when it borrowed the Babylonian month names strongly suggests to me that the Babylonians didn't have such an association (or if they did it was relatively weak, being similar to saints' days in the modern secular west, rather than how you'd actually refer to a day). IIRC I've seen a suggestion it was platonist and based on something where the day was divided into 3 hour chunks each ruled by one planet in order of speed, with the day being ruled by whichever planet got the first slot, but I'm not sure how much evidence there is for that – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 15:26
  • @Tristan Cassius Dio gives an explanation similar to that: each hour is assigned to a planet in order of distance, and each day is assigned to a planet based on its first hour. The connection to a 24-hour day seems like a bit more (albeit weak) evidence to connect it to the Babylonians, though this whole cycle would have to reset every lunar month to deal with the intercalary days. – Draconis Feb 15 '21 at 15:29
  • @Draconis. Please look at my answer to the linked question: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/16923/how-come-every-culture-on-the-planet-has-a-different-calendar-yet-follow-the-sa – fdb Feb 15 '21 at 18:19
  • The Greco/Roman day names were also imported and translated into Japanese, e.g. Monday 月曜日 (月 = Moon). – Edheldil Feb 17 '21 at 11:50
  • Another question might be: When Norse mythology was still a widely-practiced religion, did the Norsemen use day names based on their gods? Or was that something that came about later? – Darrel Hoffman Feb 17 '21 at 14:26
  • @DarrelHoffman The Romans used the planetary names for their seven-day week, so I'd expect the Germanics adopted the names and the idea of a seven-day cycle at the same time. – Draconis Feb 18 '21 at 02:21
  • @jlawler see https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/4644/2558 – alephreish Mar 15 '22 at 14:53
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Is it possible that alternate words for days of the week exist or at one time were used?

No. The Jewish custom of using foreign names for parts of the calendar dates back far beyond the earliest traces of Yiddish as a language. About the names of the months, which are are even more connected to idol worship than the names of the days of the week (one could excuse those due to astronomical nomenclature), the Jerusalem Talmud (R.H. 6a:2) states:

.דא"ר חנינה שמות חדשים עלו בידם מבבל
As Rabbi Chanina said, "The names of the months they brought in their hands from Babylonia"

In fact, I've heard that the month names being based on idol worship, serve to remind us that we are in exile. Likewise the weekday names. There was therefore no reason to adopt non-German names for any of the weekdays other than the sabbath, the latter having an explicit commandment of remembrance.

Adám
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  • the days of the week in Hebrew are (with the exception of shabbat), just numbered though – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 10:36
  • @Tristan Yes, so? Use of Hebrew as the common spoken language among Jews ceased about 2500 years ago, and didn't get resurrected until about 100 years ago. – Adám Feb 15 '21 at 10:51
  • ah sorry, I misread your post originally and thought you were saying the Hebrew names of the days of the week were associated with idol worship, rather than only the months, with it being later in Yiddish (and Ladino and various other Jewish languages) that the days of the week picked up such names – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 10:59
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    there is also increasing evidence that Hebrew was used as an everyday language alongside Aramaic under the Hasmoneans & Herodians, but that doesn't change your point, which is valid – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 11:01
  • The Hebrew month names are actually not based on idol worship either, but the Talmud speaks of the common practice, which is to use Aramaic month names in Hebrew. Thus, we find in the book of Esther 9:1 (it being the last book of the Hebrew Bible): the twelfth month—that is, the month of Adar – Adám Feb 15 '21 at 11:07
  • the original Hebrew month names weren't. The post-exilic ones were. They may have been borrowed from the Babylonians, but they've been the normal names for the months for millennia so are at least as Hebrew as the English names for the days of the week, or the months of the year are English – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 11:15
  • In Talmudic times, they had not been the normal names for millennia yet. They were so unusual that Rabbi Chanina felt compelled to make his remark. Also, it doesn't really make sense to count how long a language feature has been around for a dead language. – Adám Feb 15 '21 at 11:23
  • they'd still been the normal names for centuries by that point. The fact that they were not the original or native names was obviously not lost on the sages but the idea that that remark shows that they were unusual in the third century seems a pretty severe misreading – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 11:28
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – Adám Feb 15 '21 at 12:26
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According to Surface Languages, the Yiddish name for Wednesday is Mitvokh, which follows the German Mittwock: mid week. I think the early Christian missionaries were not comfortable with naming a day after Wotan: the English, OTOH, kept wōdnesdæg. I'm not sure when Jewish people first settled in Germany, but the Germanic gods would have been dead and buried by then. I expect that the Jewish settlers would have done what immigrants usually do: just accept the local language without troubling themselves what the words "really" meant. Most immigrants have enough problems without that.

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    I'm not sure why the missionaries would have an issue with Wotan but not with Tyr, Freyja, and Thor, though. My guess is Mittwoch replaced some earlier Wotan-based name over time for no real reason; names just do that sometimes. – Draconis Feb 16 '21 at 03:32
  • ‘Midweek’ is also found in Icelandic miðvikudagur. I also think the early missionaries were quite likely fully aware that the names are translations of the Latin names, and since they didn’t have a problem with the equally heathen Roman gods there, why would they have had a problem with the Germanic ones? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 18 '21 at 02:57