Insomnia sucks, y'all [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

Why do we have 'di' for 'day' in lundi, mercredi, dimanche, and so on, but 'jour' for 'day' in toujours, aujourd'hui, etc. (but interestingly neither 'di' nor 'jour' in hier (yesterday) or demain (tomorrow), though perhaps just as interesting that 'tomorrow' doesn't contain 'day')?

Does this have something to do with Latin etymology (does a similar pattern show up in other romance languages?) or is it a peculiarity of French? Why didn't it occur to me to ask this when I was taking French in high school? Does this pattern go all the way back to Middle French or Old French or the language(s) Old French developed from^[*]?

Is there any connection to the way some accents/dialects of English pronounce days of the week 'mundiy', 'toosdiy', 'sundiy' etc. while retaining the dehy sound in 'today' (or 'taday' or 'tuhday'^[**], or 't'day', none of which require my travelling very far to hear) ... or is that coincidence every bit as random as it appears?

And, of course, the question beneath the rest of these questions: why have I not yet managed to fall asleep from when I crawled into bed many hours ago?

[*] I'm a little fuzzy on the stages in between Latin and Old French. I foresee a long detour into Wikipedia in my near future.

[**] And can I use a schwa there, or is that character -- ə I think? -- font-specific and likely to only show for half the people reading this? Hmm. 'təday' Did that work?

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In case you're still wondering, Spanish has something similar for days of the week (lunes, martes, miercoles, jueves, viernes, sabado, domingo), but a day is "dia" and yesterday, today, tomorrow are ayer (with "anteayer" for the day before yesterday), hoy, and mañana. That last is more like English, though "morrow" is archaic in English). And now that I look at it, "hoy" might be from the same root as the "hui" in "aujourd'hui."

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Interesting. And a clue. I should post a sample text with these words in it into Google Translate and see what the Portugese, Italian, and Latin look like ... though when it comes to really short roots like 'es' and 'di' I'm not as likely to grasp what's going on as somebody who actually knows the languages in question. "Tomorrow" is kind of interesting-looking to me because instead of saying "next day" we're saying "next morning" ... though now that I "type that aloud" (so to speak), I realize that I don't know whether the practice of using 'morrow' quasi-poetically to refer to the whole next day (as well as the morning specifically) predates or postdates the coining of "tomorrow". Huh. Does "mañana" carry a similar suggestion of "morning"?

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En la mañana = in the morning, so, yes.

(Oops — didn't realize I had been logged out.)

Also, I saw the schwa! Via Opera, on Android.

(Huh. A different Schwa entirely: http://schwarestaurant.com/ )

Yes. In fact, "tomorrow morning" is "mañana de la mañana."

Latin for day is dies. French was also influenced by Celtic dialects and Norse/Germanic dialects so there may be some roots there as well. Saxon is of Germanic origin IIRC so that is where the jour might be coming from.

The Latin for "daily" is "diurnus", root of both "diurnal" and "journal".

I seem to remember this is discussed in Paden's Old Occitan. I'm about to step out the door; I'll look it up when I get home tonight.

AHA!!! Paden's Old Occitan (1998), Chapter 22 "Nouns and Adjectives (Section 1)" explains in a parenthetical comment about the declension of the Old Occitan (OOc) "jorns" ("day") and how it compares in declension to its Classical Latin (CL) "diurnus":

Note that in Classical Latin, DĬŬRNUS was an adjective meaning 'daily,' not a noun; in VL [Vulgar Latin] the adjective replaced CL DĪĒS, of the unusual fifth declension.

In other words, "diurnus" was appropriated and nounified as a second declension noun by medieval Latinophones because, if I understand Paden right, they were such slackers that they wanted out of dealing with fifth declension nouns. Which I am totally sympathetic with. By the time you make it through learning the third declension, you're like, "Screw this. There's a first or second declension synonym somewhere."

So presumably words that descend from "diurnus"-as-a-noun (such as OOc "jorns", It "giorno", Fr "jour", Eng "journey" and "journal") are later forks off the Latin tree than words that descend from "dies".

ETA: At least according to modern Occitan, the days of the week are also descended from dies, not diurnus: diluns, dimars, dimècres, dijóus, divendres, dissabte, & dimenge.

And according to my source for that, the answer to the obvious question is: lunae dies, martis dies, mercurii dies, iovis dies, veneris dies, sabbatum, et dominicus.

Edited Date: 2012-10-29 05:12 am (UTC)

Day names in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are remarkably similar to those in English. Mandag, tisdag, onsdag, torsdag, fredag, lordag, sondag -- Damnish, for example. Not all the same, but darn nearly.

Go to sleep. Really, it won't hurt. :-)

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Insomnia sucks, y'all

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