In German it is "dieser Freitag" (this Friday) and "nächster Freitag" (next Friday).
But still "nächster Freitag" isn't totally clear for everyone.
But still "nächster Freitag" isn't totally clear for everyone.
It's not uncommon to disambiguate by saying "nächsten Freitag, nicht diesen Freitag" ('next Friday, not this Friday') or just avoiding it by saying "nächste Woche Freitag" ('Friday next week') or similar.
So if on Saturday you said "our dinner reservations are next Friday, not this Friday", that could mean
— "we didn't forgot to go yesterday, we have dinner in 6 days time" (where 'this Friday' is 'Friday of this week') or could mean
— "we're not going to dinner in 6 days time, we're going to dinner in 13 days time" (where 'this Friday' is 'the Friday in this rolling block of 7 days' and 'next Friday' is the one after that).
Sounds very contrived, but people do use it in both ways and neither really has a dominance unfortunately.
Connecting "next" with a German translation of "nähest" ("closest") is just as nonsensical.
I've had the feeling that this etymological connection is more transparent in German than in English, maybe partly because we rarely use the word "nigh" anymore (except in fixed phrases like "well nigh/nigh unto" 'almost', or "the end is nigh"). while Germans use "nah" regularly.
In Romance languages this connection is also very clear. I was confused as an English speaker the first time I was waiting in line in Brazil and someone called out "próximo!" because I thought "huh? closest to what?".
I think English has acquired an kind of intuition that "next" has most to do with sequence rather than proximity, like the .next() method of a sequence or something. For example, when playing a board game one says "who's next?" or "I'm next", although with no connotation at all of physical proximity, but rather of "entitlement according to game rules". (For example, you might be going clockwise or counterclockwise, or some players might be skipped because of the action of a rule, or something.) In German you would say "wer ist daran?" or "ich bin daran", although I'm confused about the extent to which "wer ist der nächste?" is an acceptable substitute or has different connotations.
Totally unrelated, but I just tried pronouncing "dieser" and "nächster" in my only-English speaking brain and it sounds similar if not the same to "this" and "next" (especially the latter). So amazing to see how similar our languages can be sometimes. Despite English being germanic, you generally think they're completely different languages.