Simply Saturday

SATURDAY is simply named after the Roman god "Saturn," although some linguists seem to believe it actually took its name from the planet "Saturn," which nonetheless was named after the god. The name "Saturn" may go back to Etruscan, a language of uncertain origin spoken in what is now modern central Italy. Some linguists classify it as "Tyrrhenian," a language family not all linguists agree upon. The derivation from "Saturn" is not used in all of the Germanic languages, however, besides English, Dutch has "Zaterdag" and some of the Low German dialects, and some Frisian dialects have "Satertag." In Anglo-Saxon (Old English) it was both "Saeterdaeg" ("Saturn day") and "Saeternesdaeg" ("Saturn's day"), before eventually becoming our modern form. Standard German has TWO forms for Saturday, although by far the more common is "Samstag" ("Sabbath" day) which traces back to Greek, then from Greek to Hebrew, and "Sonnabend," which is literally "sun evening;" that is, evening before "Sunday," which is "Sonntag," in German. "Samstag" is used in all German speaking lands, and "Sonnabend" is used more in northern and eastern Germany. The North Germanic languages all use forms that literally mean "bath day," something that certainly carried over to earlier times in America, since Saturdays were commonly seen as the day of the week for a bath, whether you needed it or not.