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I have encountered the following interesting (at least to me) fact, that in German the words tomorrow and morning have the same spelling: Morgen. I have three questions here:

  1. Do these words have the same meaning or they are just homographs?
  2. How one could say I will do something tomorrow morning?
  3. Why is this so? I mean is it due to some historical fact?
Community
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LRDPRDX
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6 Answers6

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First of all, please mind your spelling:

  • The noun describing the time of the day or the future is capitalized: Der Morgen / das Morgen.
  • The adverb describing that something is happening the next day is written in lower case: morgen

Now obviously something can happen in the morning of the next day and morgen technically stretches until midnight of the following day. In such cases you add a qualifier and say

  • morgen früh (in the morning) or
  • morgen Vormittag (before noon)

Remember that a most people “start” their new day in the morning after a night’s rest. (The concept of a day starting at midnight is a relatively modern one and does not reflect how we humans instinctively perceive our time.) So der Morgen (the new day) starts morgens (in the morning) - really the same concept.

And just for completeness:

Ein Morgen used to be the area a single worker could till in one Morgen or Vormittag. It’s an unit of measurement which derived its name from the time span.

Stephie
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    I think almost all languages have homographs / homophones that sound odd to the non-natives. It is very nice to see the reason behind it. – Mindwin Remember Monica Dec 14 '17 at 15:46
  • @Mindwin Indeed, why is the past tense of "to read" pronounced like a primary colour? – Hagen von Eitzen Dec 15 '17 at 11:27
  • @Stephie you mean mind your grammar. Spelling-wise, M is still m whether it is lowercase or uppercase. Grammar covers additional things like capitalization. – TylerH Dec 15 '17 at 19:14
  • @Stephie your answer is not incorrect, but "der Morgen" and "das Morgen", while for sure connected, are two different nouns. The latter is the nominalized adjective "morgen". So "Es gibt ein Morgen" means "There will be a future", or literally "There will be a tomorrow". – thm Dec 16 '17 at 07:44
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    @thm that’s what I said? Time of day vs. future, first bullet point? – Stephie Dec 16 '17 at 08:03
  • to make matters more interesting, technically you could also mix it up, for instance like "am morgigen Morgen", though you'd rather find such cases in poems and similar literature forms than everyday speech or formal language. – Frank Hopkins Dec 16 '17 at 23:20
  • Let's not forget the classic German translation of the James Bond movie "Tomorrow never dies" - "Der Morgen stirbt nie" as a cautionary tale. – Thomas Dec 18 '17 at 11:50
  • How interesting how our conception of time has changed. An ancient Greek time keeping device for law court made season allowances so that periods in winter were shorter than in summer -- there was no abstract duration, perhaps, only division of a day which they knew varied in length. – releseabe Feb 19 '22 at 00:47
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Probably for the same reason it is in English. "Morrow" is a way of saying morning as is morgen, "tomorrow" is "the morrow" or the morning, and "the morrow" and "der morgen" are pretty much the same idiom.

Old English (and other Germanic) measurements of days centred around when the sun rose and set (and they weren't unique in this, obviously). I don't think anyone can give precise evidence as it'll be lost in the mists of time, but "on or in the next sunrise" is, then, probably a simple and intuitive way of expressing the concept of the next day.

autodidactyl
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One is a noun "der Morgen", and one is an adverb (morgen=tomorrow).

If you want to say "tomorrow morning" you need to say something like

morgen Vormittag

or possibly (if you mean early)

morgen früh

Although technically Morgen is the time between midnight and midday, it's usually used to mean early morning

PiedPiper
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  • Specifically, it's usually used for the time after people wake up. – gerrit Dec 14 '17 at 14:27
  • "Hier spricht Radio Bremen - Beim Gongschlag ist es 16 Uhr, guten Tag, liebe Hörer, guten Morgen liebe Studenten!" – tofro Dec 19 '17 at 08:55
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It's not just German. The Spanish word mañana means exactly the same thing.

One way to think of Morgen is to say it means in the morning. If today’s morning has already passed, why then, obviously it refers to the next day.

Of course, you can always use Vormittag which means before noon.

user unknown
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Jennifer
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Too add to the answer that Stephie provided, this pattern is seen in several languages for this same word.

In English morning was derived from morrow which has both (archaic) meanings of tomorrow and morning, and is itself related to morgen.

morrow (plural morrows)

  1. (archaic or poetic) The next or following day.
  2. (archaic) Morning.

The same thing is seen in Spanish with mañana, which again, shares the same meanings of tomorrow and morning.

mañana m, f (plural mañanas)

  1. (feminine) the morning
  2. (masculine) the near future; tomorrow
gmiley
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    Your link to morgen is somewhat misleading. English morrow does not derive from German morgen, but from Old English morgen (which is cognate with German morgen, but also not derived from it), which doesn’t have an entry on Wiktionary. You might want to change the link to Proto-Germanic *murginaz, from which both the English and German words derive. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 16 '17 at 14:13
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    I changed it to related from derived. It was muy original intent, but I hadn't proof-read my answer before posting. – gmiley Dec 17 '17 at 15:55
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"Morgen", when used to greet someone in the morning, is just short for "Guten Morgen!" which means "good morning". If used to describe the future, like "Morgen wird es regnen", (it will rain tomorrow) it means "tomorrow".

Mario Maus
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