I’ve long wondered about the word for today in various languages. Even within the Romance group, they seem so different: hoy, oggi, and aujourd’hui in Spanish, Italian, and French respectively. IIRC hodie is the Latin word, and it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to suppose that hoy comes from that word. But what about Oggi and especially aujourd’hui?
And as an aside, did the German word heute (today) also come into the language from Latin, via early Roman-German contact?
The Latin word for day is “dies”, the adjective of which is “diurnus”, daily. IIRC this is where French “jour” came from. “Aujourd’hui” is, of course, derived from “jour”.
hoje is “today” in Portuguese, and the way it’s pronounced is similar to oggi.
I guessed that aujourd’hui was somehow related to jour, but whence the 'hui?
I knew that dies is Latin for day, but what about today, or this day?
Latin hodie had a aspiration at the beginning (h), as Vulgar Latin became Italian, aspiration was dropped at the beginning of words (which is why “ho” is pronounced as “o”), while the combination “di” because like English “j.” Thus, “oggi” is in fact descended from “hodie.”
UnuMondo
To-divvus* is today in Romani, divvus meaning day. I think the ‘to’ prefix is just loaned from English.
*There are many dialects of Romani, in others the word may differ.
I don’t think Romani is a Romance language.
It seems pretty clear to me that 'hui comes from the same root as hoy, though that doesn’t get us any closer to an answer.
The OP wondered about the word for today in various languages, I thought they’d like to know another one.
You’re kinda correct - Romani isn’t a Romance language as such - it’s mainly derived from Sanskrit. However it’s picked up many loan words from other languages. For example: kris (A court or council, I suppose) has IIRC the same latin root as ‘crisis’ in English.
As already pointed out, the “jour” (also “day” in french) comes from the latin “diurnus” (day) and the “hui” part from the latin “hodie” (today). So, litterally, “aujourd’dui= au jour de hui” means “at the day of today”.
The reason French has such a long word is to avoid confusion. The older word for “today” was indeed “hui” (probably from “hoi”). The problem was that “hui” sounded a lot like “oui” (“yes”). Because of this, the “aujourd’” was added to differentiate.
This makes perfect sense, but until today I believed (courtesy of my French teacher) that it was from au jour d’huit.
Bearing in mind that French people say “huit jours” (8 days) meaning a week - and “quinze jours” (15 days) for two weeks - it was quite plausible that it meant “this day of eight”, i.e. this day of the week.
“hodie” just means “this day” in Latin.
My dictionnary disagrees with your teacher, hibernicus…
By the way, refering to long words, “au jour d’aujourd’hui” is sometimes used in french, with the meaning “nowaday”
Combine the demostrative adjective (hic, haec, hoc) with day (dies), and you get to “hodie” and to the other constructions mentioned.
Ah, “to the day of to day of today”! Those irrepressible French!
These are great answers, everybody!
As I said, I thought that Hodie meant Today, and that it was the root of Sp. Hoy, but disclaimed it because I did not want to admit that I thought so only because I remember seeing the sign headed “Hodie” in the movie Gladiator. Apparently correctly, now that **Neurodoc ** has substantiated it, I assumed it was a list of the day’s fights.