Feb. 6th, 2007 01:10 pm
Tomorrow is already yesterday
Today in Language Log, Bill Poser has a brief entry about the remarkable Hindi words कल and परसों, whose temporal reference depends on the tense of the sentences they appear in. No prizes for guessing that cognates exist in Panjabi as well, where ਕੱਲ kall similarly means "yesterday" in past-tense clauses and "tomorrow" elsewhere. I love the related compound ਅਜਕਲ ajkal (where aj means "today") so much that I already posted about it elsewhere.
I've been meaning to talk about ਪਰਸੋਂ parsoṁ "the day after tomorrow; the day before yesterday" in a longer entry on words of similar meaning in other languages. After surveying several languages of Europe and Asia, I'm beginning to wonder if English isn't something of an odd man out in preferring the circumlocutions "the day after tomorrow" and "the day before yesterday" to more compact (although generally compound) lexemes like German übermorgen/vorgestern or Korean 모레 moley/그저께 kucekkey.
I've been meaning to talk about ਪਰਸੋਂ parsoṁ "the day after tomorrow; the day before yesterday" in a longer entry on words of similar meaning in other languages. After surveying several languages of Europe and Asia, I'm beginning to wonder if English isn't something of an odd man out in preferring the circumlocutions "the day after tomorrow" and "the day before yesterday" to more compact (although generally compound) lexemes like German übermorgen/vorgestern or Korean 모레 moley/그저께 kucekkey.