History of terms for 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'

[Malcolm Ross]

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I am interested in the diachronic origins of terms for 'yesterday'
and 'tomorrow'. In Germanic, Slavic and Oceanic Austronesian
languages, at least, we find terms for 'yesterday' derived from
'evening' (Slavic, Oceanic) and for 'tomorrow' from 'morning'
(Germanic, Oceanic). I have three questions:

1) Is there a Slavonic specialist who can tell me how Russian
/vchera/ 'evening' is related to /vecher/ 'evening'? I take it
/vchera/ is a case-marked form of /vecher/, but I haven't managed to
locate the details.

2) Are there similar developments in other language families? I
assume there are, and I would be grateful for examples.

3) Has anyone written anything about these developments? Perhaps I
have been looking in the wrong places, but almost everything I have
found about the linguistics of time is either about aspect and tense
(like Comrie's excellent works) or has a strong philosophical bias.
The development of lexical items seems too mundane to command
attention.

Please reply to my e-mail address and I will summarise for the list
whatever replies I receive.

Thank you.

Malcolm Ross
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Dr Malcolm D. Ross
Senior Fellow
Department of Linguistics
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
Australian National University
CANBERRA ACT 0200