Saturday
Sonnabend and Saterdag are redirections to this article. For other meanings, see Saturday (disambiguation) and Sonnabend (disambiguation). For the educational researcher, see Hermann Saterdag.
Saturday in western and southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, or Sonnabend predominantly in northern and eastern Germany, is the day between Friday and Sunday in the civil calendar. According to traditional Judeo-Christian counting it is the seventh and last day of the week, according to international standardized counting (ISO 8601) it is the sixth.
In the Roman calendar, Saturday represented the first day of the week as the "day of Saturn," since Saturn ranked highest among the planets in the seven weekday names in the downward sidereal order. Cassius Dio referred to the first direct evidence as the first day of the week in connection with the city of Pompeii, which was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on the "fourth day of the week" (August 24, 79 AD). In the further course Saturday shifted from the first to the last day according to the Christian count.
Saturday is a working day, even though it has not been a working day in most trades and crafts since the 1950s.
However, when calculating time limits, Saturday is treated as a Sunday or public holiday: If the end of the time limit falls on a Saturday, the time limit is extended to the next working day (§ 193 BGB).
Furthermore, Saturday is not a bank working day internationally and therefore not a TARGET day; the Bundesbank's electronic mass payments system (EMZ) is suspended. This does not prevent some credit institutions from keeping their branches open to the public on Saturdays, e.g. at railway stations or airports.
With regard to the due date of the rent for a residential property, regulated by Section 556b (1) of the German Civil Code (BGB), which states: "The rent shall be paid at the beginning, at the latest by the third working day of the individual periods according to which it is assessed", the Federal Court of Justice ruled on 13 July 2013 that Saturdays do not count as working days in this respect.
The day has in the standard German usage two designations, which are used regionally differently partly almost exclusively, partly parallel. In recent times, a tendency towards Saturday is noticeable.
Saturday, scene in front of the synagogue in Fürth, the women (left) wear Empire-style dresses, the men the festive costume of the traditionally living Jews in South and West Germany, Germany circa 1800
Etymology
Saturday
The name Saturday, Old High German sambaztac, comes from a developed vulgar Greek form *sambaton of the Greek word sabbaton, which ultimately goes back to an equation of the designation from the "day of Saturn" (also "sater day") in reference to the Hebrew term Šabbatai ("star (Saturn) of Šabbath") and thus to Hebrew shabbath ("rest", "holiday", "Sabbath"). It spread up the Danube with the missionization of the southern German-speaking area and is used today in Austria, southern and western Germany. It is considered a holiday especially in the Jewish religion and in the Seventh-day Adventist Free Church. The names in the Romance languages uniformly go back to it: French le samedi, Ital. il sabato, Spanish el sábado.
Linguistically untenable is the interpretation that the Old High German form can be traced back to S'Ambeth's day, i.e. to a day in honour of an alleged Norse-Celtic earth goddess Ambeth, one of the three Bethen. This thesis seems to explain the geographical distribution in Austria and southern Germany quite well, but already the theory of the existence of the Bethen as a pagan goddess trinity is based solely on the dubious interpretations of the lay researchers Hans Christoph Schöll (1936: Die drei Ewigen) and Richard Fester (1962: Sprache der Eiszeit), whose theses are rejected by linguists practically without exception.
Saturday
The term Sonnabend (Old High German: sunnunaband, Old English sunnanæfen) came into the German-speaking world from Old English, probably with the Anglo-Saxon mission. The second part originally meant "(pre)evening". In the early Middle Ages the denomination extended to the whole day, as with the whole day before Christmas Day (Christmas Eve or before New Year's Day, compare also English New Year's Eve (New Year's Eve) or fortnight = 14 days from ags. feorwertyne niht). "Sonnabend" is used especially in Northern Germany and East Central German.
"Sonnabend" was the official term in the GDR (according to the prevailing regional distribution). The term "Sonnabend" is also used in some German legal texts (e.g. in § 193 BGB or in shop closing laws of some northern and eastern German Länder).
In Austria, Switzerland and southern Germany, the term is largely uncommon and is known at most in the passive vocabulary as typically northern German.
Other forms
In Westphalia and in East Frisian Platt, the Low German Saterdag (compare Dutch Zaterdag, Afrikaans Saterdag, and English Saturday), a loan translation of Latin Dies Saturni ("Day of Saturnus"), has survived.
Sonnamt in some places in the colloquial language and in the Berlin dialect.
From the Russian word for Saturday, Subbota (Russian Суббота), the Subbotnik is derived, the voluntary unpaid work on Saturday. At times, such work assignments were also more common in the GDR.
