Today, tonight and tomorrow...

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Imralu
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Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Imralu »

This might seem straightforward but it doesn't have to be.

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.


* * * * * * *

:con: :png: 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.
So, what this means is, if you come home and ask your partner what they did today, you'll use anye (current day) the sun is still up and azi (past day) if the sun is down. Likewise, if you are asking about someone's plans for tonight, during the day you'll say owoga but once the sun goes down, this period of time has begun and you'll use owonye. When the sun is down, there is no time that can be described as anye because all days are either in the past or the future, and, for the same reason, when the sun is up, there is no time that can be referred to as owonye.

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.
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Lambuzhao »

When I lived in :per:, which is also near the Equator, the times for when to say "buenos días", "buenas tardes" and "buenas noches" were fairly clear-cut without much 'wobbling' of day-length due to seasonal shifts like at other latitudes.

But one thing that blew my mind was this. Peruvians, as a rule, liked to party pretty hard. Simple parties would easily last until 2-4 am. What blew my mind was, as we'd say goodbye in the darkling pre-dawn, what to say????

'Buenos días' felt wrong b/c it clearly wasn't daylight. However, 'buenas noches' would get laughs b/c, by the time you got home, the first rays of rosy-fingered Dawn would be stretching out and lighting the skies.

Most of the time, they'd avoid those kinds of despedidas entirely, and for the wee-wee hours, say some kind of 'Cuídense' + 'hasta (insert word)' combo-breaker.

But sometimes I'd press it with them, to see how they'd react.

Any ideas there?
Any special pre-dawn/gloaming/dilucular goodbyes and/or greetings???
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Imralu »

Beats me. I still don't really get what an evening is and don't use the word outside of the phrase good-evening. I think this is because of growing up somewhere with a quick sunset. To me, afternoon is followed by night. And in general, I find time-based greetings to be a pain. Hello and goodbye. In my country, we say "have a good one"...
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by gestaltist »

Imralu wrote:Beats me. I still don't really get what an evening is and don't use the word outside of the phrase good-evening. I think this is because of growing up somewhere with a quick sunset. To me, afternoon is followed by night. And in general, I find time-based greetings to be a pain. Hello and goodbye. In my country, we say "have a good one"...
What about "G'day mate"?
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Imralu »

That's really only etymological. People say g'day at night time too and it's only occasionally that someone will say "but it's night time!" G'day is just hello.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by gestaltist »

Imralu wrote:That's really only etymological. People say g'day at night time too and it's only occasionally that someone will say "but it's night time!" G'day is just hello.
Interesting.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by GrandPiano »

For me, afternoon is when it's completely bright outside, evening is when it's darker but not totally dark, and night is when it's as dark as it's going to get. If the color of the sky is visible, the division is pretty clear: during the late morning or afternoon, the sky is its standard light blue color; during the evening, the sky is dark, but not black; at night, the sky is black.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Imralu »

Where I grew up, evening is, like, maybe 20 minutes then.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Znex »

Evening in Sydney area is more or less the time around sunset into the early night; something like 5:00 at its earliest to 8:30 or so. Like we have dinner at evening; even during winter, evening is still about the same time. Mind you, I'd suppose evening would be shorter for kids; it has something to with being some amount of time before sleeping hours.

It's plain night around bed time and up to a number of hours after midnight 'til waking hours. Sunrise doesn't play too much of a role, other than if we're up and it's still dark, it's early morning as opposed to plain morning.

On a different note, I'm pretty sure the Jewish 24-hour starts and ends at dawn rather than midnight.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by GrandPiano »

I suppose what I said applies best to an average spring or autumn day; if it's 8:00 pm on a mid-winter day and the sky is already completely dark, I'd probably still call it evening.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Clio »

Znex wrote:On a different note, I'm pretty sure the Jewish 24-hour starts and ends at dawn rather than midnight.
It actually starts at sunset (with a little extra time for the Shabbat, which is kind of interesting).
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Znex »

Oh, that's right. I knew it had to be sunrise or sunset.
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Re: Today, tonight and tomorrow...

Post by Iyionaku »

In German, if you go home at 4am and attempt to meet with your friends at, say, 8am but you are going to sleep in between, you will refer to the meeting time as "morgen" (tomorrow), although it's the same day and only four hours between time A and time B.
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