(no subject)

[khiemtran]

Hindi and Urdu use the same word for both "yesterday" and "tomorrow". And yet society has not collapsed.

(It turns out that the tenses are all you need, but it seems a shame to gave up some of the wonderful little side alleys that you get with languages with more inbuilt redundancy. "I will eat yesterday", for example, is a perfectly valid English sentence and no doubt of great utility to time travellers.)

Comments

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Is that true? (About the word, not the society.) If so, fascinating--and can you tell me what the word is?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's "kal" (कल). It looks like the same thing applies to "the day after tomorrow"/"the day before yesterday", which might have been a bit of a nuisance for movie translators. I'll try to find out more on Monday.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Neat, thanks! Now I can look it up... :-)

[karinfromnosund.livejournal.com]

And Russian uses the same word for 'a moment ago', 'right now' and 'in a moment'. Yesterday and tomorrow are different words, though.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Cool!

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Welsh seems to go in the opposite direction and has words not only for "yesterday and "tomorrow" but also has a word for "the day before yesterday".

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Italian has a word for the day before yesterday ("l'altroieri") and for the day after tomorrow ("dopodomani"). Admittedly, they're both compound words, but still :-)

(Literally, otheryesterday and aftertomorrow.)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

I see your dopodomani and raise you shiasatte (the day after the day after tomorrow in Japanese).

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

It *is* interesting that a language feels a need for a word like shiasatte. To me it seems over the top: but it could be because (a) I'm Italian and Italian stops at dopodomani, and/or (b) my mathematical skill stops at "one-two-many-lots"...

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That's interesting and possibly connected. I had feeling that Welsh also had a word for "the day after tomorrow", but I couldn't remember it. But I've now found it in the dictionary, so the pattern is the same as the Italian. Could both derive originally from Latin? The names for the Welsh months came from the ancient Roman names, so they may have taken other time related words too.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

I've looked it up, and it seems that the Italian words are Italian compounds -- i.e. they don't come from equivalent Latin words.

According to my old Latin dictionary:

"Dopodomani" (day after tomorrow) is "perendie" or "dies tertius"; can't analyse the first except that die=day, while the second is literally "the third day": Latin always includes today when it counts days, unlike Italian or English.

"Ierlaltro" (literary version of l'altroieri, day before yesterday) iss "nudius tertius" -- literally "now it's the third day (since)".

None of the Latin words are related to the Italian words, either by form or by literal meaning: does it sound like they're related to the Welsh?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Hebrew has מחרתיים machartayim (lit. two tomorrows) for the day after tomorrow, and שלשום shilshom, derived from שלוש, "three", for the day before yesterday. The counting on the latter is reminiscent of the way the Romans did dates, a.d. iii kal. ian. "the third day before the Kalends of January" actually meaning the 30th of December. Doubt there's any link though: Klein's Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language relates the Hebrew word to a phrase in Akkadian which means it goes back a thousand years and more before Latin ever existed, and on a different continent.

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

As you can see in my comment above, it turns out Latin does indeed use a word related to "three" for "day before yesterday", and exactly for the reason you mention; but I totally agree with you that they can't be related :-)