I’m reading Jack London stories and I’ve noticed that he spells “today” “to-day”. Was it a common practice a century ago, if so why, and why isn’t it so to-day?
Whenever you have a question like this, do the following: Google on the terms “etymology” and (in this case) “today”. You will come up with the following website in this case:
As you can see, the word comes from the phrase “to day”, which meant “on this day”. It was shortened to “to-day” and then to “today”.
Well, OK, but then how on earth did “to day” come to mean “on this day”? Your link does not make this clear at all (at least not to me). If “to day” once meant “today” in English, what do old Germanic forms have to do with it? The words “to” and “day” have both been around a long time in English, and “to” does not mean “on this” in any other context I can think of.
Yes. It was NOT uncommon a century ago.
I’ll try to post some more in a bit.
The English language(can’t speak for others) has a habit of changing over time. Spellings that were common 3-9 centuries ago aren’t always the same today. Language evolves. Spelling evolves. When language is mostly verbal, centuries ago, different hearers spell it differently. Only when the written word is common does it become more standardized.
You may think that “to-day” in 1900 sounds too quaint, but there are probably many more examples which could be called up.
Wendell Wagner has it, but to rephrase:
In Old English, the preposition tō had many, many meanings, most of which continue into modern English, but some only in fossilized expressions. One of those meanings was “at” in expressions of time: tō midre niht, “at midnight”; tō dæg, “to day.” At day = at this day = on this day =today. The hyphen indicates “we understand that this is two words, to + day, but we’re kind of using it as a single word.” Two things have happened since: we’ve reduced our hyphen usage a lot, and we’ve started to see today as a different word from day.
Another trend in the evolution of English that we should note is the tendency for a phrase that was originally just some words with separate meanings to get turned into a phrase that is understood as a whole even though the separate words may change in meaning. Then the phrase is turned into a hyphenated expression. Then the hyphen is dropped and it becomes a single word.
So the phrase “to day” once had a clear meaning just from the individual words because the word “to” had an additional meaning of “on”. Furthermore, in English of that period, it wasn’t necessary to put “this” into the phrase. So “to day” meant what we would currently mean by the phrase “on this day”. Eventually the word “to” dropped the meaning “on”, and it also became necessary to use “this” when you used such expressions. However, by this point the phrase “to day” became a standard way of saying what we presently mean by “today”. In other words, even before the expression was hyphenated and then compressed into a single word, English-speakers already found “to day” to be an old-fashioned expression. They knew that it meant what we presently call “today”, but they knew that the individual words meant something different.
So what happens in cases like this is that people start to think of the expression as being a single word instead of as a phrase. People thus started writing “to-day” instead of “to day”. Eventually they thought of it so much as a single word that they began writing it as just “today”.
The same process happened with the word “tomorrow”. Here’s the etymology of that word:
Originally it was the phrase “to morgenne”. Once again, the word “to” could mean “in” among its other meanings. Once again, it wasn’t necessary to include “the” because that was understood. The word “morgenne” meant “morning”. Thus the phrase “on morgenne” meant what we mean by “in the morning” in modern English. The phrase “to morgenne” then changed through other phonological changes in English into “to morrow”. Eventually, although the phrase “to morrow” continued to mean the same as “tomorrow” in modern English, the individual words changed their meanings. So once again there was a phrase that was understood even that it sounded like an old-fashioned expression. Once again what happened was that the expression began to be thought of as a single word. So it was written first as a hyphened word “to-morrow” and then as a single word “tomorrow”.
So the typical path is the following:
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There is a phrase in which each of the words has their obvious meanings. The whole phrase is not thought of as a single expression because it’s not necessary to look at it that way. It’s obvious from the meaning of the individual words what the phrase means.
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Some of the words in the phrase change their meanings through the normal drift in meanings. (And, yes, this is absolutely typical of languages. The meaning of words frequently changes.)
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At this point, the phrase has to be understood by the speakers only as a complete phrase. If they tried to understand it by the meanings of the individual words, it wouldn’t make sense. It’s now an idiom, where the entire phrase means something different from what the individual words mean.
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So it’s easiest for speakers to pretend that it’s not a phrase at all but just a single word. They hyphenate the words of the phrase to treat it as a single word.
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Then the hyphens are dropped and it’s written without a hyphen or a space. As far as any speaker of the language at that point knows, it’s just a word with no connection to any phrase. They don’t know anything about the etymology of the word and don’t know that it was originally a phrase.
Fascinating! I always thought Spanish was weird in that it uses the same word for “tomorrow” and “morning”. Little did I know that English basically does the same thing, though this is now obscured by a relatively recent split between those two words.
The British publisher Kegan Paul put out over 100 books between 1924 and 1931 under the series title of “To-day and To-morrow.” They were looks - guesses, screeds, prognostications, prophecies - at possible futures on everything from war to law to entertainment. The regular use of the hyphen in to-day probably lasted longer in UK English but you can find examples in the US that are as late.
General usage in the English language begins with two separate words, hyphenates them, and them finally joins them together. Web site, web-site, website. The trend toward eliminating hyphens has accelerated in recent years making the older versions look strange.
Take H. G. Wells" First Men in the Moon. You’ll find coffee-pot, sauce-pan, and frying-pan on the first page.
Whoops, got called away and hit enter too soon.
Frying-pan is an interesting example of a word that went the other way. That happens but much less frequently than the reverse.
Sometimes a phrase will go back and forth between having spaces and having hyphens for a while. Notice that in the case of “frying pan” (or “frying-pan”) that the original meanings of “fry” and “pan” haven’t changed. Thus there isn’t as much motivation for the phrase to become hyphenated and for hyphens to drop out and the phrase to become clumped together into a single word. Notice however that (it seems to me) the phrase “frying pan” doesn’t just mean “pan for frying”. It means a particular size and shape for a pan, regardless of what the pan is used for. It may be inconvenient and even downright silly to boil water in a frying pan on top of a stove, but you would still call it a frying pan.
Interesting book series you speak of, were there any major hits Mr. Paul made in his books?
I don’t understand how a word goes from morgenne to morrow in popular use. If everyone says morgenne, then someone, somewhere, has to be the first person to say morrow instead of morgenne. Once that person says morrow for the first time, then the listener or reader would probably say, “WTF is morrow? Don’t you mean morgenne, you idiot? Why are you trying to change the language? Go move to Scotland if you don’t like it, you shite!”
Well, as an example, “alright”. When the hell did that become okay? You see it in newspapers now. In formal writing my brain still thinks it’s a misspelling, and I assume that’s how it started out.
Dutch and German do that too, and in Slavic languages the words for morning and tomorrow are closely related. So Spanish is totally un-weird here.
I saw To-day in books originally printed in the 1960’s that we used in school. I think it was First Aid In English. I thought at the time it was just to help kids to sound out the words.
Maybe the listener responded more favorably and decided to also start saying morrow instead of morgenne. Then that person’s friends also started saying morrow, etc. etc. Then, there’s this whole subculture of hipsters saying morrow trying to convince their peers and the older crowd that saying morgenne is lame.
Then, when two sets of parents get together and chat, one of them says “to morgenne” and then another parent chimes in quickly and says with a sarcastic scoff, “Oops! You know it’s “to morrow” now according to the kids. Heh hehe.” Then the parents knowingly chuckle at kids these days, perhaps make some snide remark about the schools, and fail to understand that morrow will eventually come to kick morgenne’s ass.
Bearflag70, do you really insult people who don’t talk exactly like you? So how many times have you been punched out by those people? I know I would never do anything as dangerous as make fun of someone else’s accent, since I know that eventually someone would beat me to a pulp for doing such a thing.
In any case, here’s the etymology for morrow:
As you can see, “morgen” apparently dropped the n sound at the end at some point in time to become “morge” and then the g sound turned into a w sound. Then eventually the resulting “morwe” turned into “morrow”. I am no expert in the phonological changes in the history of English, so I don’t know if this is exactly how it happened. In any case, languages are always slowly changing in pronunciation, just as they are always slowly changing in the meanings of words, in the words that they use, and in their grammar. Yes, always. All I can suggest is what I have suggested many times before on the SDMB, to read The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. This is the best popular explanation that I know of about why and how languages change.
Zsofia, I don’t particularly like “alright” either, but it’s perfectly clear what happened in that case. The phrase “all right” began to be perceived as a single expression, so it was compressed into a single word, and the word was spelled “alright”. (Just in case, because the following weird assumption is constantly made about my posts: Just because I say that something is happening, it does not mean that I approve (or even have any opinion about) whether it is happening. The fact that I say that phrases are frequently compressed into hyphenated words and then into words without hyphens or spaces does not mean that I like it to happen in every case. Everything I have discussed in this thread is just my explanations of standard observations in linguistics. Whether I like it happening is completely irrelevant to noticing that it happens.)
My post was tongue-in-cheek essentially asking how a culture has a word and how that word changes sound and spelling while maintaining the original meaning. I have a hard time seeing how one person or a minority group with an accent could cause the whole culture to alter words like that.
Obviously I see how one word can change meanings over time and I can see how two words can become one word, and how one word might get split into two, I suppose, but I’m trying to understand how one word morphs into quite a different word with the same definition.
In your example, what I don’t understand is how a “g” turns into a “w” sound.
It’s actually quite a common change. There’s an intermediate sound, a voiced velar fricative, no longer found in English, represented by IPA Ɣ. Wikipedia with sound file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative. Especially after a back vowel, this sound changes to a W in English. The English word “bow” is another example where historical g > w, and there are lots of others.