h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In German all nouns are capitalised, not just the start of the sentence or any proper nouns. After a quick chat with a (Swiss) German speaker in the office here, it seems that this is something most younger German speakers would like to see done away with in the next set of spelling reforms.

However this could be a Swiss thing. I'll have to enquire further at our next tea break!

Hope that helps,

Perseus

All that from a daft question 4 days ago. Thank you one and all.

I would have thought that alright and all right have different meanings. This may be subtle or a misconception on my part?

PPI (PPi) is an abreviation of Personal Pronoun I. I don't think ic is pronounced ick as Old English/Anglo-Saxon is a North Germanic tongue. German Ich is more likely. I'll check tonight.

Another question. What is the origin of 'yesterday'? It's the yester... I am interested in and I haven't been able to find an answer.

turvy

Well, apparently 'yester' is an archaic word meaning
"Last; last past; next before" so yesterday is the last day or the day before today. An example of where the language has lost a word except in compound form.

it also quotes the word 'yesternight' which I can see an a logical progression, but have never heard of!

http://www.etymonline.com/

"yesterday - O.E. geostran dæg, from geostran
"yesterday" (from P.Gmc. *gestra-, from PIE *ghes) +
dæg "day." Yesteryear coined 1870 by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti to translate Fr. antan (from V.L. *anteannum "the
year before") in a poem by Villon. "

http://www.etymonline.com/

Old English (Anglo-Saxon) ic was pronounced 'itch', but is very closely related to the German 'ich'.

Already is in the dictionary as being a rare alternative spelling of all right. It means exactly the same thing. It dates from 1887. 'All right' itself dates from about 75 years early, although it had been in use for the same meaning about 600 years ago and died out.

>> It's the yester... I am interested in and... <<

Curiously, 'yesteryear' is more general in meaning than 'yesterday'.

It probably started out like 'yesterday', meaning 'the year before this year' (ie: 'last year'). But these days it means any sort of time period in the not too distant past.

It is primarily used in discussions or presentations of antique technologies, such as the 'trains, steamships, or autos of/from Yesteryear', a reference to those romantic 'good old days' within someone's living memory. Although it is sometimes used to mean the really 'olden days', but again in a Camelot-type, romantically ideal way.

Yester is from a Latin word, the 'er' bit turned round like it is in Chester.


Yesterday,
yester-you
said yes t' me...



~jwf~

~jwf~:

where did you find the Latin word that is the origin of "yester"?

The street clears as the Brits run for cover behind barrels, vats and rain butts. At one end of the street stands the lone figure of Anhaga, a giant dictionary in his hand as he claims that 'yester' comes from Proto Germanic. At the other end of the street stands the bearded figure of ~jwf~. He doesn't appear to have any form weapon except his wry grin. ~jwf~ feints and anhaga faints. The dictionary falls from his hand and lies open on the prefix 'yester', ironically proving him right.

*smattering of applause from other side of the pond*

t.

( A shadowy, cloaked figure, attracted by the sense of imminent wordplay, lurks just out of focus and mutters: "If I remember correctly, the French for yesterday "hier" is a corruption of the Latin word "heri", but I'm blowed if I want to get in between those two hombres.")

>> ..where did you find the Latin word that is the origin of "yester"? <<

I didn't. I very seldom actually look things up, depending instead on my intuition and vague general theories of word origins from Latin, French and German classes at Uni in the days of yore (aka: yesteryear).

Yes, I really ought to have added a 'probably' to my proposition that 'yesterday' might be one of those words rooted in the core Latin formation '..str..' that is at the heart of 'sinister', 'canister', 'banister', 'bolster', 'monster', 'construction', 'defenestration' and 'hamstring'.

Let me expand on my hypothesis.

The infinitive of the French verb 'to be' is really 'e[s]tre', although in French the 's' is replaced with one of those chinese hats over the 'e' to indicate the 's' has been removed. This gives us a clue to the bone-marrow meaning of '..str..' as 'is-ness' or 'being' in a temporal sense.

Whenever I see an '..str..' formation it brings to mind a quality of presence, temporal awareness, or a sense of time and place. This mode is inherent in most of the words with a '..str..' variant in their backbone. 'Chester' for example is an English variant of the Latin word for 'camp' or 'where we is camped'.

Also in French, the word for 'window' has that '..str..' at the core with the 's' again removed and hinted at by a chinese hat. So 'fene[s]tre' breaks down to 'fen' or 'ven' as in 'vent' and 'e(s)tre' as the place where the 'vent' 'is' or the 'is-ness of ventillation'.

This whole business of 'is-ness' indicated by the '..str..' root is then modified by that all important 'Y' at the fore. For the 'Y' as a prefix indicates distance or removal as in words like 'yore' (the 'days of yore') and also in 'yon' as in 'behold yon ship', and of course, 'yonder'.

So it is easy to see that "Y - estre" is the 'is-ness that was' or the 'when that used to be'. It is the sense of 'being' but in a past time, at a distance, back there somewhere, back 'yonder'.


~jwf~

That's a really beautiful tower you've built, ~jwf~. But the Latin verb "to be" is "esse". And "yester" was part of English when French was just Latin in the Roman province of Gaul.


And canister comes from a Greek word for a basket made of reeds, while banister comes from a greek word, balaustion, which doesn't have your str bit in it and means "a wild pomegranate flower".

and . . .

I bow to the bigger-grin.

In fact, now might be a good time to thank anhaga generally for his reminder by example in several threads that some restraint, some regularity, some conformity, some discipline, some adherence to convention, some observance of rules, some acknowledgement of precedent and even a little research effort are sometimes necessary. If only to give my free radical approach some definition by comparison.

Alright then folks, back to your jobs and houses. There'll be no gun play here today.


~jwf~

Where's the d$%@ smiley?

The German for "yesterday" is "gestern" which just about puts the lid on that one, I would say.

Thanks to a comment of WS's - encountered somewhere in the backlog - I now have pictures of men going up and down on ropes, dangling from cranes - that's a picture that takes you back.

"And halfway up, I met the barrel comng down again".....

thanks for that one !

Yeah,
Sadly it's not Hoffnung mentioned nowadays.

"Where's the d$%@ smiley?"

I reckon the closest you'll get, for fuzzy hippy logic, is

Would anyone like to comment on the poetic "yestre'en"?

It's Scottish, as is Hallowe'en.