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Hodie is a Latin adverb meaning "today" or "at the present time". I am rather curious as to how this word developed.

Was it originally a compound of hōc and diē, which would be translated as "on this day"? That's the only theory I have so far; are there perhaps any definitive pieces of evidence on this topic?

Joonas Ilmavirta
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Sapphira
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4 Answers4

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As is often the case with things that seem obvious, the explanation of hodiē as a contraction of hōc + diē is actually problematic and hotly contested. One theory is that it is from the bare stem *ho-. Another that is from the old abl. sing. *hōd *diēd (with secondary shift of -ōdd- to -od-). The former seems to me more straightforward.

PS. Lewis and Short (1879) is hardly the last word on Latin etymology.

fdb
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    A third possibility for the first member is locative *hoi (thus Meiser, cited in de Vaan s.v., who adds "I see no way to decide this point"). – TKR Feb 06 '17 at 00:17
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    One fragment from Varro (yes, not to be wholly trusted for his etymological scholarship) has "cum hodie dicimus, nihil aliud quam hoc die intelligitur." Given that this is the "obvious" etymology, could you explain why exactly this is considered problematic? – brianpck Feb 06 '17 at 14:58
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    @brianpck. It would involve the development of -ōcd- to -ŏd-. I do not think there is any parallel for this. – fdb Feb 06 '17 at 16:20
  • @fdb I'm not a linguist, but wouldn't that be as simple as dropping the -ce? hic is a compound after all. – brianpck Feb 06 '17 at 16:43
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    Pg. 23 of this article argues for this etymology. Also: how does this explain the parallel terms pridie and postridie? – brianpck Feb 06 '17 at 16:54
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    @Alex B.I also wonder why it was deleted. Never mind 'hotly', why on Earth should the origin of hodie be contested at all? The simple explanation can be applied not only in Latin (and English) but in the Russian сегодня, German heute, and, no doubt, in others too. – Tom Cotton Feb 06 '17 at 17:19
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    @TomCotton. Nobody is denying that "hodie" means "this day". The issue is only the case form (nominative, ablative, locative, bare root?) of the first component, and the mysterious disappearance of any consonants at the end of the first component. – fdb Feb 06 '17 at 19:43
  • @fdb the Russian сегодня is much clearer in this regard - this.GEN day. At least, it looks like genitive. – Alex B. Feb 06 '17 at 20:30
  • An additional bit of evidence cited in the article @brianpck linked to (p. 25) is an Old Latin form hocedie cited by the grammarian Victorinus, which for whatever it's worth weighs against the bare-stem etymology. – TKR Feb 06 '17 at 22:33
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The simplest explanation is exactly as you suggested: hōc "this" + diē "day", in the ablative of time-when. This is what my old Latin textbook said, as well as Lewis and Short's dictionary:

hŏdĭē, adv. contr. from hoc die, on this day

Very similar derivations have happened in other languages:

  • English "today" < Old English tō "at" + "day"
  • German heute "today" < Old High German *hiu tagu "this day" (cf Tag)
  • Dutch vandaag "today" < van "of" + daag "day"
  • Attic Greek τήμερον "today" < *kyā- "this" (possibly the root of Latin cis) + ἡμέρα "day"

And Latin has similar words:

  • prīdiē "on the day before" < Old Latin pri "before" (root of prior) + diē
  • postrīdiē "on the day after" < posterō + diē

In comments on the other answer, brianpck provided some additional evidence. A fragment of Varro (number 11 here) mentions:

...et cum hodie dicimus, nihil aliud quam hoc die intelligitur.

(My translation:)

...and when we say "today", no other meaning except "on this day" is understood.

For a more modern and scholarly source, who probably did significantly more research than Varro, this article argues for the same etymology.

cmw
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Draconis
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    1907 is hardly "modern". Anyway, as I said above: Nobody is denying that "hodie" means "this day". The issue is only the case form (nominative, ablative, locative, bare root?) of the first component, and the mysterious disappearance of any consonants at the end of the first component. – fdb Feb 06 '17 at 19:45
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    Ancient etymologies like Varro's aren't evidence for anything except ancient beliefs about etymology (which are no more reliable than their beliefs about any other science). – TKR Feb 06 '17 at 22:22
  • I don't disagree; folk etymology is amusing but fairly useless. Just wanted to bring up the other common explanation with what evidence I've seen for it, which happens to not be very much: I have no good explanation for od < ōcd either. (And it's significantly less clear than the derivation of any of those other words.) – Draconis Feb 06 '17 at 22:41
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That's exactly right (though as a contraction), as a look at Lewis & Short shows:

hŏdĭē , adv. contr. from hoc die, on this day,

The English today actually developed in the same way:

today (adv.) Old English todæge, to dæge "on (this) day," from to "at, on" + dæge, dative of dæg "day."

cmw
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  1. Universal human laziness would have favored dropping the voiceless velar before the voiced dental. Under rapid speech, I don't think the /k/ sound would survive long. You don't always need a universal sound change rule for every change in a language. Some changes are bound to be random or unique. That's the second law of thermodynamics (which takes precedence over the rules of linguistics).
  2. The tongue's location in the mouth for a dental sound is similar to where It is when /i/ or /e/ are articulated. Palletization may already have been underway in some dialects by the time "hoc" plus "die" became a compound word. It's not far-fetched to think that voiceless /k/ became voiced hard /g/ next to the voiced /d/, becoming palletized and then lost entirely in short order.
  3. /K/ +/D/ is rare or impossible inside words in Latin, based on my limited experience. I wonder if, once it became a compound word, that this unusual combination of sounds ended up being dropped. If retained, it would be a marker of the border between two separate "words" rather than a possible internal consonant cluster of a proper Latin word. That would have been important to the native Latin listener. To conform with the rules governing consonant clusters within Latin words, the /k/ or the /d/ would have to be lost. Because "Day" is the dominant word-meaning unit, the /k/ sound of the subordinate "this" would have to be discarded by native speakers.
  4. Perhaps it was a borrowing from a nearby But distinct latinate language in the early years of Rome. Perhaps that related language did have a rule for the loss of a voiceless velar next to a voiced dental. Since it didn't violate sound rules for consonant clusters within Latin words, it was quickly adopted.
  5. Linguistics hasn't obviously embraced Occam's razor, like other sciences have with great success. Just because you don't have a "rule" for a disappearing C next to a D, doesn't mean the simplest solution doesn't carry. The alternative solutions put forth seem somewhat contrived and unconvincing, therefore the default "lay explanation" is good enough until linguistics experts come up with something a little more convincing. Since "HOC +DIE" is just a hypothesis, it shouldn't rile anybody up. It makes sense to me. Call it in "operating hypothesis" until some linguistics genius comes up with an alternative theory that makes as much sense.
David Stanley
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    +1 You had me at "thermodynamics > linguistics". – Ben Kovitz Apr 19 '21 at 03:06
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    Note that the problem is not just the loss of the [k], but the short vowel in the first syllable. As you say, [kd] is an uncomfortable cluster for Latin, but it's hard to see why its simplification would cause the vowel to shorten. – TKR Apr 19 '21 at 04:04
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    "That's the second law of thermodynamics (which takes precedence over the rules of linguistics)." — honestly not trying to be mean, but this is one of the most amusing things I've read on this website xD In fact, I'm currently reading an introduction to a book that discusses how Linguistics has been too keen on swinging "Ockham's razor with Aristotle's blade". In this case it's the other way around. If there's no rule, postulating one to explain one single occurrence is violating the parsimony principle. An exception like this will never be accepted as a satisfactory explanation in linguistics – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 19 '21 at 16:01
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    Also, it's spelled "palatalisation": this process changes /k/ into /ch/ (Kirche = Church) and isn't relevant in this case. More importantly, hōc is secondarily made up of hō(d) + ce, and so there's no need to explain away the absense of /k~g/ - just don't postulate the ce in the first place. Parsimony again. The deletion of /d/ in Ablatives is already a regular process. The only thing that actually needs explaining here is the short /o/. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 19 '21 at 16:06
  • @Unbrutal_Russian I understand the invocation of Ockham's Razor here to mean skepticism about postulating a law to explain every change of every word, as against random and unique changes influenced by ordinary factors like laziness. The latter seems to me the proper scientific presumption; the former has a burden to meet. It seems to me that linguists have often tried to treat language as if it were the periodic table of the elements (more than chemists treat the real thing), when we all know that language is messy. (And many push this condescendingly, as if it makes them superior.) – Ben Kovitz Apr 19 '21 at 22:50
  • That said, I do find it puzzling that the word is hŏdiē rather than hōdiē, as @TKR concisely stated above. The pressure from the folk etymology that hodie is short for hōc diē is so strong that I had to keep checking it in dictionaries for a long time, thinking that it must be hōdiē. Since syllable length tends to be pretty stable in Latin, it seems reasonable to ask, "What happened to the long ō? Maybe it's not short for hōc diē?" I'm glad, though, to see someone offer the simple hypothesis, "Maybe people shortened this vowel in a random, unique occurrence, not following a law." – Ben Kovitz Apr 19 '21 at 23:06
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    'Assuming laziness' is anti-scientific, it's a magic wand you wave at something you can't explain to make it disappear. If laziness is universal and vowel shortening is exceptional, then you have a problem - another is defining laziness. The difference between too often and not often enough is significant if you know ~90% of what the people in question know - an outsider cannot judge about that. The way randomness disappears as you learn more about language is known as Dunning-Kruger. One or ten people learning a vowel as short happens. An entire city - there's nothing random about that. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 19 '21 at 23:58
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    @BenKovitz The thing is that "Maybe people shortened this vowel in a random, unique occurrence" isn't actually an explanation. Most sound change is regular, and presumably none of it is literally random, so talking about "a random occurrence" just amounts to positing some unknown and unknowable cause rather than trying to apply known processes, which is the opposite of Occam's razor. – TKR Apr 20 '21 at 02:48
  • @TKR We're probably going far beyond the scope of the question, but I'm curious about your opinion: Is this physics envy? As I understand things, randomness (unrelatedness) is the default; the burden of proof is on a claim of regularity. In the hard sciences, we don't expect explanations for everything. Even in the soft sciences, statistics is commonplace: randomness is commonly put into equations explicitly. Are linguists trying to get prestige by insisting on more regularity in language than there really is (denying the ubiquity of arbitrariness), to appear more scientific? – Ben Kovitz Apr 20 '21 at 03:53
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    @BenKovitz No, it isn't physics envy. It really is the case that most sound change is regular; if we lived in a world in which it was random, historical linguistics wouldn't be possible in the first place. – TKR Apr 20 '21 at 04:00
  • @TKR I think my question wasn't clear due to cramming it into 600 characters. A second version: Are linguists taught that Occam's Razor means that regularity is the default (the presumption) and a claim of randomness/unrelatedness/arbitrariness requires an additional postulate? For example, English sky means the same as Latin caelum. Most of us would presume that no explanation is to be found, that the difference is arbitrary—until shown evidence that these words got their sounds and meanings by a universal rule. Do linguists really think it's the other way around? – Ben Kovitz Apr 20 '21 at 04:36
  • @TKR Just to be clear, I do understand that you're saying that sound changes are regular, a special premise assumed only for this narrow topic, which, if understood as an inviolable rule, shifts the burden of proof to the claim of an exception. I'm curious to ask more about that, too, but right now I'm just interested in getting clear on this unusual (to me) use of Occam's Razor. – Ben Kovitz Apr 20 '21 at 04:42
  • @BenKovitz That's a very different question. Linguistic signs are arbitrary (mostly), but that has nothing to do with whether phonological or other processes that affect their forms are regular. – TKR Apr 20 '21 at 04:42
  • @TKR I don't think that quite answered my question, but maybe that's OK. About regularity of sound changes: are they really so regular that we should not expect a single deviation? From what I've seen in English, randomness is common. Off the top of my head, Bach is usually pronounced with a velar fricative but Mach is usually /mak/; some drop the middle syllable in tetanus and some don't; in some regions people dropped the e- of electricity but not the e- of election. Isn't there normally some randomness/irregularity in sound changes? – Ben Kovitz Apr 20 '21 at 05:26
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    @BenKovitz Sporadic changes certainly exist, and I don't think any linguist today would really claim that sound change is absolutely exceptionless (unless you define "sound change" to mean "the kind of change that's exceptionalness"). There are some sporadic changes reconstructed for Latin as well. The point about hodie specifically is that AFAIK there are no good parallels for the putative shortening, even irregular ones; and the broader general point is that an account that doesn't appeal to randomness will (ceteris paribus) be more attractive than one that does. – TKR Apr 20 '21 at 05:50
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    BTW none of your examples is necessarily an instance of irregular sound change. The adaptation of loanwords isn't really part of sound change at all (though admittedly regular principles should ideally be findable there too). "Some drop the middle syllable in tetanus and some don't" describes variation between idiolects, not inconsistency within a single speech variety (though such variation can be a source of apparently irregular sound change due to diffusion). The treatment of electricity vs. election could be phonologically conditioned (no elision before a primary stressed syllable). – TKR Apr 20 '21 at 05:55
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    @TKR Thank you for the patient and thoughtful explanation. I certainly agree that hŏdiē is a strange case that reasonably calls for explanation (and that factors extending beyond a single case are likely in my examples). I also think it's reasonable (not anti-scientific, not deplorable) to entertain "chance, the ever-present rival conjecture" (in the words of G. Polya) even when you've observed a lot of regularity. Agreement about all these things is not necessary, of course. – Ben Kovitz Apr 20 '21 at 06:19
  • @BenKovitz To believe that the diff. between caelum and sky is arbitrary one needs to believe that someone made those words up out of nothing, and in order to believe that one has to have no notion of historical linguistics, linguistic change, the comparative reconstruction method etc etc. This would be to linguistics exactly like believing that the position of heavenly bodies is arbitrary - subject to divine whim - and than one needs to pray to the Sky Father to ensure the Sun comes up in the morning. Science is about finding explanations, and "none to be found" is the opposite of it. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 22 '21 at 21:16
  • No science would be possible on the assumption that randomness is the default, and none is, because it would explain everything and nothing. You could write a physics paper where you introduce the data and the entirety of your theoretical section is "it's random", and the conclusion is "nothing new, everything is still random". The only locus of *"randomness"* in current physics that I know of is in quantum physics with its interposition, and so current physics is preoccupied with explaining this randomness away. That is to say it's preoccupied with exorcising the latest god of the gaps. – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 22 '21 at 21:20
  • @Unbrutal_Russian Let's talk about this in chat. What you're saying sounds to me so far-out crazy that I figure that there is either a misunderstanding or…something interesting to discover. (Any idea how to start a one-topic chat room?) – Ben Kovitz Apr 22 '21 at 21:28
  • @BenKovitz Is this getting spicy or what?! Invite sent (finding the chat invite button on this site is a veritable Odyssey). – Unbrutal_Russian Apr 22 '21 at 22:51