h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Here's a little bit more on this subject.
As you can see from the article, the Romans gave each of the seven days a name based on their gods (which are also planets). But in English only three of the days retain those names (Saturday, Sunday and Monday).
In French, however, all the days retain their Roman names (Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi, Samedi). The reason for this is that the Romans were smart.
When they invaded Britain they spotted that the locals were resistant, and also worshipped Norse gods. They had to impose their calendar to keep the logistics of Empire working smoothly, but they allowed the Britons to name the days after their own gods rather than the Roman ones in order that they felt more comfortable with being under Roman rule.
So English has a mixture of Norse and Roman gods as names of days, whereas continental European languages have purely Roman ones because they were considered less likely to rebel against Roman rule.

I doubt that it had anything to do with the romans being smart. the english language came mainly from the anglo-saxons who hadn't arrived and imposed their language until after the romans had gone. when the romans invaded britain the locals were celts who probably did adopt the roman day names. after the anglo-saxons imposed their english language onto most of the island the anglo saxon names would have superseded the roman ones. also only very few continental languages have purely roman names and they were the ones west of the rhine (except portugese which has a different system altogether based on ordinal numbers). all the countries which speak germanic languages such as english, german, dutch and including all the scandinavian languages all take names for most of their days from germanic gods except for saturday, sunday and monday, although german uses mittwoch (midweek) for wednesday instead of any gods. My question is where did norse languages get loerdag (saturday) from and german (samstag) whilst the english and dutch names are almost identical to each other

Thanks Joel77
The additional info is appreciated!!