Swedish has a word "dygn" that refers to a 24-hour period. It's extremely useful and I am often very annoyed that this word downy exist in English.
English users the word "day" most of the time and just home there won't be any miscommunication, or they use cumbersome versions like "24 hours".
It also leads to very silly expressions like "I'll be on vacation there for 3 days 2 nights", instead of just being able to say "I'll be there for 2 dygn".
@loke I have sort of the opposite side of this in that I'm learning Swedish and don't really know where to use "dygn", so just use "dagar" everywhere, which is usually correct but not always. Your explanation here helped a bit but I'm still not sure when this (needing to refer to a 24-hour period) would come up?
@tomw 'dag' technically refers to the time when the sun is up. Obviously '30 dagar' and '30 dygn' is going to be pretty much the same, so using them interchangeably is ok.
One case where it's useful is if someone telks you they'll be staying at a resort for '4 dagar'. How long will they be spending there? If you say 4 dygn it's much more clear.
Another case is if you, like me, was doing a big upload to a cloud server that was very slow. If I tell you it takes 2 days to upload, that gives you different information than of I say it takes ett dygn.
@loke Yeah that makes sense! For the resort case in English I would probably just say "3 nights" and leave the days out of it, but yeah for that uploading one I guess I would say "24 hours". So it covers both of those phrases
@tomw I'm not a fan of Saphir-Whorff, but the language you use can probably make a small contribution to how you think about things, especially abstract concepts such as time. This may be one of these cases (but very minor).
@ancientsounds@mastodonapp.uk@loke @tomw
If I may join in, and with respect, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis fares pretty badly on concepts of time in English. For example, we speak of the future as lying “before” us, whereas if an event occurs before now it is in the past, which we think of as behind us. We think of past, present and future (on a time line), but English only marks tense for present vs. various pasts (perfect vs. imperfect). Futures are expressed by modal verbs relating to possibility (may, might), intention (would), duty (should) etc.
The linguistic/grammatical structure of time reference in English is quite different from the conceptual structure of time. For such reasons, few if any academic linguists or philosophers think Sapir-Whorf has any merit or explanatory usefulness.
@ancientsounds @tomw I mean, I don't disagree with anything you said.
But your comment had very little, if anything, to do what what the discussion was about. In fact, I don't think anyone in the thread even mentioned grammar, and this was purely about vocabulary. Especially how the existence (or lack thereof) of a specific word, describing very a specific thing, affects the way certain time periods are described.
This is about a very subtle differences between two Germanic languages (and then Austranesian languages for comparison)
@tomw @loke
In normal use I would say you'd use "dag" ("jag är på resa i fem dagar" - I'm traveling for five days), and only use dygn when either there's a risk of confusion or you want to emphasize the 24-hour span for some reason.
So with "han har varit försvunnen i tre dygn" (he's been missing for three days) it emphasizes the time span and the seriousness of the situation.
@loke @jannem It seems like it matches up with a phrase like (using your example) "he has now been missing for 72 hours" – which is a little clumsy but serves the same function of emphasising that the situation is serious. And then secondarily resolving the ambiguity about how many "days" (meaning nights) a trip lasts for.
@tomw @loke
After replying I thought more about it, and perhaps it's as simple as "dygn" being precise that in itself adds a sense of formality and weight.
Same kind of difference in register as saying "a glass of water" vs. "200ml of water". It's not that the latter is more formal in itself; you just don't specify the amount like that unless you need to.