German Word-of-the-Day for Owlet: Day 1

[muckefuck]

heute /'hOY.t@/ "today"

This may not look anything like der Tag "day", but that only goes to show you what a thousand years of phonetic erosion can do to a word. The Old High German form is hiu tagu, "this day" in the long-vanished instrumental case (and with an obsolete form of the demonstrative). There were parallel formations with die Nacht "night" and das Jahr "year", but nowadays heint and heuer are basically restricted to the Upper German dialects of the southeast. For "tonight", the modern standard uses the collocation heute Nacht (or heute Abend if you mean the period before bedtime).

English gets a lot of credit for freely shifting words from one part of speech to another, but one area where German has the drop on it is in forming adjectives from time adverbs. From heute you get heutig "contemporary, present-day". For instance, bis zum heutigen Tag "up to the present day". (Heuer does this, too, of course, giving us the Austrian dialect word der Heurige for newly-bottled wine or the establishments which sell it.) Heute also has restricted use as a noun in the phrase von heute "of today; today's".

To say "a week from today", you have a choice between the familiar heute in einer Woche and the more puzzling heute in acht Tagen "today in eight days". Heute also appears somewhat unexpectedly in the conventional ending to a fairy tale: und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute, lit. "and if they haven't died, then they live still today".

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Well, it's definitely not exclusively a German peculiarity. "Fortnight" is quinzaine in French, quincena in Spanish, and pythefnos ("fifteen night") in Welsh. I think it has to do with counting today when you do the math. That is, "a week Monday" is: Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri-Sat-Sun-Mon--eight days.