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Comment by ochrist | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. This is about Welsh: "Likewise, diwrnod ‘day’ goes back to Latin diurnāta, apparently an alternative word for ‘day’ that also led to French journée and Italian giornata."

In Danish the word 'døgn' indicates a day and a night (24 hours). I don't know if these words have a shared origin, but it sounds plausible (not a scientist).

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The Danish word comes from Old Norse dœgn, ultimately a derivation from Proto-Germanic dōgaz ‘daily’. (If one is familiar with comparative Germanic linguistics, the long vowel in the Old Norse form speaks against any borrowing from Latin diurnāta). Meanwhile, Latin diurnāta is a derivation from dies ‘day’, unrelated to the Germanic word.

If you are curious about where words come from, the English-language Wiktionary often has etymologies in its entries for words, and for the Nordic languages they are usually pretty up-to-date in terms of the scholarly state of the art.

Thanks. I had actually checked Wiktionary but only the Danish language version.

Its so interesting. If you follow dōgaz one more step you get to Proto-Indi-European dheg: (to burn).

Origin of Latin “dies” is also from PIE but a different word: dyews: (sky, heaven).

Interesting Latin dies (day) and deus (deity) are very much related since both come from dyews.

My favorite trivia related to dyews is that the Greek "theos" (theology etc) is unrelated despite the sinilarity, but the Greek "Zeus" is :)

Oh yeah that’s a good one. Both Zeus and Jupiter are cognates of Dyus Pter (Sky Father) of old Indo European mythology. They just took different parts of that name.

In French you also have a closer "diurne" - "that happens during the day".

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