Fwd: "yestersol"

[Mark A. Mandel]

Going through old mail...

#Date:    Thu, 26 Feb 2004 21:15:46 -0500
#From:    Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
#Subject: Fwd: "yestersol"
#
#An early nominee for the WOTY list, courtesy of a colleague on another list...
#
#--- begin forwarded text
#
#Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 00:20:59 +0000
#From: JohnM <john at scroll.demon.co.uk>
#Subject: yestersol
#
#As someone who is following closely the Mars mission
#(and will almost certainly put a summary on my website)
#I couldn't help being fascinated by the new word 'yestersol'
#which NASA has invented (sol being a Martian day, 20 mins
#longer than ours). I have not as yet seen 'tosol' but it can't
#be far away.
#
#Now you can't have a word like this in many other languages.
#You can't in any Latin-derived languages, you can't in Greek or in
#German. The only language I know when you can have a similar
#construction is Hungarian (nap=day) tegnap=yesterday ->tegsol)
#and they are one better because they can have tomorrow, too!
#(holnap=tomorrow->holsol).
#
#Sorry for being so sad, but does anyone know any other languages that
#could have yestersol?

Latin could have 'tosol'. L. 'today' is "hodie" (long i and e), lit. 'on
this day'. (The morphology is totally lost in, e.g., the Spanish
daughter word "hoy".) Latin 'tomorrow', though, is useless for this
purpose, "cras", and I don't remember L. 'yesterday'.

FWIW, the Klingon words are morphologically transparent but lexically
difficult:
        DaHjaj: this + day
        wa'Hu': one + 'days ago'
        wa'leS: one + 'days from now'
 -- the difficulty being that the three head roots are completely
unrelated!

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania