In late October I took a long weekend trip to Norway, to be honest it wasn’t intended to be a journey to learn about anything religious themed.  But I did make an interesting discovery looking at shop signs.   In Norwegian Lordag is “Lord’s day”

Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden I have learned all became Christianised between 900 and 1200AD.  I visited Finland in 2002 its a bit different, as it has a different language and I’m not sure about its history as modern Finland became a nation in 1918.

There’s always been confusion over if Saturday or Sunday should be a holy day and if it got interfered with over the years by the Greeks, or the Vatican or whatever.   I’m still undecided on this, so I decided to do some research using Google Translator.

So what is saturday in other languages, Saturday, Lord’s Day, Sabbath, or something completely different?

Norwegian – lørdag
Danish – lørdag
Swedish – lördag
Faroese – leygardagur
Icelandic – laugardagur
Estonian – laupäev
Finnish – lauantai
Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) – Arfininngorneq
Northern Saami – lávvordat

Ok, now lets head back southwards;

Serbian – Субота (Sebota)
Polish – sobota
Romanian – sâmbătă
Uzbek – shanba
Urkainian – субота
Azerbajani – şənbə
Albanian – e shtunë
Russian – суббота
Macedonian – сабота
Czech – sobota
Hungarian – szombati
Slovak – sobota
Catalan – dissabte
Lithuanian – šeštadienis
Latvia – sestdiena

This isn’t a big surprise as Russia and Eastern Europe and the Baltics had a lot of Jews.

More closer to home we have:-
Spanish – sábado
Portugese – sábado
French – samedi
Italian – Sabato
Greek – Σάββατο (Sávvato)  Big surprise there!!
Galician – sábado
Welsh – Dydd Sadwrn
Dutch – zaterdag
German – Sonnabend

Hebrew – יום שבת (Yom Shabbat, yeah!!)
Yiddish – שבת (like above)
Maltese – Is-Sibt (Maltese is a Semitic language, therefore distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew)
Amharic – Qdame (Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia)
Arabic – يوم السبت (sebat)
Persian – روز شنبه (shanbe)

Even languages spoken Israel’s worst enemies seem similar!!

Various Hebrew Roots people will say that Greek or Catholicism changed our weekend’s days around, but from what I see here, that my own nation using English, that we got a Pagan word (Saturday, based on Saturn-day) over our neighbours, I find this most interesting….

Norway – The city of Bergen – Days of the week – Norway and Judeo/Christian influence – Bergen’s fish market – Electric automotive Utopia – Bergen’s forest of Christmas