Vindicarre wrote:
I would say that the Germanic people's heavy influence on the English (Old and Middle) language gave us the naming conventions we use. The Germans got the conventions from the Romans, who got them from the Greeks. Pretty much historical business as usual.
This. In Latin, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday are Dies Lunae (goddess of the moon), Dies Martis (Mars), Dies Mercurii (Mercury), Dies Iovis (Jove, or Jupiter), Dies Veneris (Venus), Dies Saturni (Saturn), and Dies Solis (Sol, god of the sun).
The Germanic tribes picked this up and chose analogous gods in their own pantheon to name days after. So we swap Mars, god of war, for Tyr, god of heroism and glorious combat; Mercury gets traded for Odin, both poets and psychopomps. Thor and Jupiter are both gods of thunder; Frigg and Venus both goddesses of beauty and sex.
Old English, then, is a Germanic tongue, not a Romantic (Latin-derived) one. So we got the Scandinavian pantheon substitutes. Not sure why we kept Saturday, and why we dropped the dieties and went straight to the celestial domains for Sunday and Monday.