At the WordReference forums someone inquires on Romanian grammar: Why "noapte bună"? The word order appears one way in bună dimineaţă 'good morning', bună ziuă 'good day', bună dupămasă 'good afternoon' and bună seară 'good evening', matching what we see in other Romance languages like French and Portuguese. Yet the order is reversed in noapte bună 'good night'! The Wiktionary entry for noapte bună gives no helpful notes on this curious pattern.
Come to think of it, I wonder why we have the same untypical word order in the Polish greeting dzień dobry 'day + good', instead of the normal pattern seen in dobranoc 'good night' (univerbated). Frankly, I have no idea.
ReplyDeleteJust a hunch: is 'dobranoc' based on the short form (dobra) or long form (dobraja)? 'dobry' is based on the long one (dobrUjI), right?
ReplyDeleteThe long form, I think (not that it matters much for Polish, especialy in the feminine, where the endings have merged). We also have dobry wieczór 'good evening', obviously with the long form of the adjective. Dzień dobry is simply exceptional for reasons that are unclear to me. It's all the more puzzling in view of Czech dobrý den, Russian dóbryj den’ and the same order all about the place (including German, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Romanian and other non-Slavic languages in the neighbourhood).
ReplyDeleteAnother idea, maybe as silly as the previous one: What if originally 'dobry' in 'dzień dobry' is a complement rather than an attribute, I mean something like 'good (may) be your day!' (sorry for my Polish: "[niech] dzień [pana jest] dobry]") has been simplified to what we see in the Polish of today...? Or, perhaps, due to different discourse frequency (?) and/or for some pragmatic/sociolinguistic reasons... Anyway, it would be interesting to see how common this phenomenon is cross-linguistically.
ReplyDeleteI have done some historical research. It seems that in Old Polish the normal word order in greetings was dobry dzień and dobry wieczór. In the mid-17th century there was a tendency to reverse both of them to dzień dobry and wieczór dobry. After a period of hesitation, with both orders co-existing, one variant in each pair became fixed: dzień dobry and dobry wieczór. It looks to me like a case of variant elimination by random drift. Since there were similar fluctuations in the history of Romanian (e.g. seara bună was "corrected" to bună seara by purists during the Romanian "national awakening"), I suppose a similar scenario can be proposed for both languages.
ReplyDeletePerhaps there was an analogical pressure to ensure a final -ă in all semantically-related phrases. If the phrase follows the general Adj + N order 'bună noapte', then it is the only one in the paradigm not ending in -ă. Hence the order reversal to 'noapte bună'.
ReplyDeleteIn Romanian "Buna ziua", "Buna seara", "Buna dimineata" are welcoming formulas, but "Noapte buna" is a farewell formula. If you want to say farewell during the day you say "O zi buna" - "(Have) a nice day" or "O seara buna" - "(Have) a nice evening"
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