Timeline for What does "to-" in today, tomorrow, tonight mean?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 27, 2015 at 14:13 | comment | added | NPS | I thought of that but it's possible to speak of morning before it comes (the same day). :P | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 13:19 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @NPS That's a common thing in Indo-European languages: for whatever reason, we use a word for ‘morning’ to refer to the day after today. It's the same in Romance languages where French demain, Spanish mañana, Italian domani, etc. ultimately all go back to variations of Latin dē manē ‘in the morning’. Probably the logic is that when you speak of ‘morning’, you mean the next one that comes, and during the day, after morning has passed, the next morning that comes around also entails the next day. | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 13:14 | comment | added | NPS | @JanusBahsJacquet You didn't understand me. I didn't ask why this preposition and not any other. I asked why tomorrow means a time in the next day and not this one. | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 12:44 | comment | added | Hugh | @JanusBahsJacquet, special thanks for the link to semi-transparent cranberry morphemes. | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 12:10 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | And -gether is a cranberry morpheme which is historically (and still at least semi-transparently) related to the verb gather. | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 12:09 | comment | added | Janus Bahs Jacquet | @NPS There’s no way of knowing why it’s today/-morrow/night/-gether/-ward, rather than onday/-morrow/etc. That’s just the preposition they decided to use in the area where what later became Old English developed. Other Germanic languages chose other prepositions to use. The Nordic languages all have ‘in’, for example, like Danish i dag, i aften, i morgen; but then in Icelandic it’s still í dag, í kvöld, but á morgun ‘on morrow’, and í morgun instead means ‘this morning’. And of course in English tomorrow is equivalent to on the morrow. Prepositions vary. They just do. | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 11:10 | comment | added | NPS | Then why "in-morrow"/"on-morrow" means what tomorrow? Doesn't make sense. Also what would "gether" be? | |
| Jun 27, 2015 at 10:08 | history | answered | deadrat | CC BY-SA 3.0 |