I just wanted to start a thread to talk about possibilities for time divisions that novice conlangers might not have thought about. More specifically, what one means by day and night and ordering things with last, this and next. The translation forum seemed like the best place for this to me but I'm OK with this being moved.
The way day and night are defined and used varies a bit from language to language. In English, day means both "an entire 24 hour cycle" (Swedish dygn, Polish doba - no opposite) and "the period of this cycle where the sun is up" (Swedish dag, Polish dzień - opposite of "night"). English does have a word for the 24-hour cycle, but it's a long loanword from Greek and only used by smarty-pantses who know it. (Nychthemeron.)
Also, in English (along with all other natlangs that I know well enough to comment on - most likely due to the huge spread of the standard Western terrestrial model of timekeeping, calendars, time zones etc,), the beginning of the dygn-day is at midnight, not at dawn as with the dag-day. To me, this feels a bit unusual. At 12:14am, I don't feel right calling the day that we are technically in "today". The natural thing to me is that the day begins upon waking, but when everyone has a different cycle, this is clearly impossible.
I'm aware of many languages (mostly conlangs I think, with their own method of timekeeping) having the day begin at dawn, counting the hours from then. This of course presents the problem of seasonal changes in daylight length making a bit of a mess of things. and that breaks down completely if your society is in a region with any polar-day/night.
As an ESL teacher, I learnt a lot indirectly about languages I don't know much of. I remember some students of mine, particularly Japanese students, who were a bit miffed that "next" and "last" don't simply mean the closest future or closest past X. For example, if today is Tuesday and I say "next Thursday", I don't mean the next Thursday after the moment of speaking, the one in two days, but the Thursday of the next week... I gather that the closest equivalent words in Japanese don't work this way and even though I don't speak it, the Japanese way sounds a lot more logical and easy to learn than the English way.
So yeah, basically, this is just a thread to describe how your conlang or any interesting natlangs treat these aspects of time division.
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Wena:
Wena is spoken on an island very near the equator, with year-round almost equal day and night and very quick sunsets and sunrises without extended twilight periods that last hours, meaning it is essentially always clear if it is day or night (something I've sometimes been confused about since moving from around latitude 26° to 52°... is the sun up or not?).
Wena has the words nyogya and nyodwo meaning "daytime" and "night time" respectively (literally basically "suntime" and "blacktime"). There is another (more common) word for night, owo, probably a shortening of nyodwo. When used as an adverb, the nyo "time" part of nyogya is redundant and usually dropped.
- nyogya = day, daytime, a period from a sunrise to the following sunset
owo or nyodwo = night, night time, a period from a sunset to the following sunrise
wi gya or wi nyogya = in the day, in the daytime (literally ≈ "with it/there being sun(time)")
wi owo or wi nyodwo = at night, in the night, at night time, in the night time
There is no word for nychthemeron - you just say "a night and a day". (I might come up with one though.)
To say yesterday, today and tomorrow, you attach the perfect, progressive and prospective markers to the word for day, giving gyazi, gyanye, and gyaga respectively, although these are generally (depending on register) shortened to azi, anye, and aga. These are nouns and to be used as adverbs they are preceded by wi. The same thing happens with owo, yielding owozi, owonye and owoga
- wi azi = yesterday / today
= in the most recent completed period of daylight before now *
wi owozi = last night / this morning before dawn
= in the most recently completed period of night time before now *
wi anye = today
= in the current, unfinished period of daylight *
wi owonye = tonight
= in the current, unfinished period of night time *
wi aga = tomorrow / today
= in the next coming period of daylight after now *
wi owoga = tonight / tomorrow night
= in the next coming period of night time after now *
* or (that of) the contextually understood point in time - meaning other translations of these phrases are possible, "that day", "the day before" etc.
Numerals can simply be placed after the word for the day or night to indicate greater distances of days/nights. For example, during the daytime on the 1st of January, wi owoga gwa (gwa = two, pair) means "in two nights", "the night after tomorrow night" (i.e. the night time from the 2nd to the 3rd), but saying this after sunset on the first, it will now jump ahead to the night of the 3rd to the 4th, with the night from the 2nd to the 3rd now only being the next period of darkness and things losing the gwa.
Other time periods all work the same way in Wena. The only irregularity is with the loanword wigi "week", which generally drops the second syllable to become wiga instead of wigiga. Month is nyomyo "moontime" and similar to "day", it drops the myo when it is modified for time. It used these days to refer to the calendar months but used to refer to the period between new moons.