[Lingtyp] Languages with lexicalization of "pre-yesterday" but not "yesterday"

Ponrawee Prasertsom ponrawee.pra at gmail.com
Sun Oct 13 07:00:00 UTC 2024


Dear all,

English has a word for "yesterday", but not "past beyond yesterday". The
same goes for tomorrow, and not "future beyond tomorrow".

I was wondering if anyone knows of languages with the opposite situation,
i.e., ones that encode "past beyond yesterday" or "future beyond tomorrow"
as lexical items but NOT "yesterday" or "tomorrow". For example, in this
language, if you wanted to talk about "yesterday" you would have to say
something like "the past except shesterday", where shesterday means "past
beyond yesterday". Note that I'm talking about items that are temporally
bounded only on one side, and not, say "the day before yesterday" or "the
day after tomorrow", which are bounded on both sides.

I'm mostly interested in cases where this item is lexical (roughly, free
and optional), but would be keen to hear about cases where it's grammatical
as well. In the grammatical case, this would be a system that has a
pre-hesternal past tense, and a general past tense (which would implicate
hesternal past, but the implicature is defeasible).

Best regards,
Ponrawee Prasertsom

PhD Student
University of Edinburgh
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