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German Morgen vs. morgen | ||
Tags: Meaning of words | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| adoggie Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6533 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese* Studies: German, Russian, French | Message 1 of 11 26 March 2010 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Morgen can mean both "morning" and "tomorrow." Are both meanings, when used as nouns, capitalized? I know "morgens" is an adverb that means "mornings," and "tomorrow" can only be a noun. Am I correct in this?
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 11 26 March 2010 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Der Morgen as in 'time of the day' = has article = noun = capitalized
morgens as in 'at that time of the day, regularly' = adverb = lowercase morgen as in 'at the following day' = adverb = lowercase 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 11 26 March 2010 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Can "morgen" be a noun, as in "yesterday's tomorrow"?
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6470 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 11 26 March 2010 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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No, because of the obvious possibilities of confusion, "morgen" in the sense of
"tomorrow" can never be a noun. You have to use a circumlocution like "der nächste Tag", "der folgende Tag" or the like. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 11 26 March 2010 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||
"Morgen" and "morrow" both mean morning. "See you tomorrow" was originally something like "See you in the morning", which means that "I will see you in the next morning", and its meaning has spread to "I will see you in the next daytime". (Or possibly they invented afternoons and evenings later in history, I don't know.) If you were to say "yesterday's the morning", there is no implication of "next morning", so it has to be "the morning during yesterday". In a whole lot of languages, tomorrow has evolved in this way, and can only be relative today. Even in English we don't say "*Monday's tomorrow" or "*tomorrow's tomorrow". We could, now that "morrow" doesn't mean morning any more, but we don't. We still say "the day after". Most European languages are the same. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 6 of 11 26 March 2010 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Doesn't morgen also stand for a measure of land? Interestingly the word jutro in Serbian and most Slavic languages also means morning and also stands for a measure of land. I think it has something to do with how much of land could a peasant plough in one morning (before lunch) with a pair of oxen, or something like that.
Another interesting thing, I don't know if it was discussed here, is how words for tomorrow and morning on one side and yesterday and evening on the other are similar or same in many languages. For example, in old Slovak morning was jutro and tomorrow was zajutra (from the morning), and večer was evening and večera (G. of večer) was yesterday. Situation in modern Slovak is a bit different since jutro is archaic and zajutra and večera have been shortened to zajtra and včera. Edited by Delodephius on 26 March 2010 at 10:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 11 26 March 2010 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, that is "das Morgen" - but it's a really low frequency and poetic expression. I think the only time I ever noticed it in contemporary pop culture (which is a good indicator for spoken language after all) was in this song: Thomas D feat. Nina Hagen Delodephius, der Morgen as measurement unit also is low frequency and almost obsolete. It certainly isn't the kind of word that *has* to be mentioned when somebody is still sorting out the different meanings of morgen in the original sense ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 11 26 March 2010 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Being a farm boy I use the word jutro a lot every day. I doubt German farmers don't use morgen frequently amongst themselves. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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