# Morning



## theorange4

So I understand that hyvää huomenta means good morning. I discovered that aamu and aamupäivä also mean morning. What is the difference between these terms?


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## fennofiili

theorange4 said:


> So I understand that hyvää huomenta means good morning.



Yes, but that’s one of the few contexts where _huomen _is used. Otherwise _aamu _is the word for morning, except in (old) poetry. Oh, and _huomenna_, which is an essive form of _huomen_, but used as an adverb meaning “tomorrow”.

By the way, we usually omit the word _hyvää _from greetings and say just _Huomenta!_



> I discovered that aamu and aamupäivä also mean morning. What is the difference between these terms?



There are no strict definitions for them, but basically _aamu _means early morning, until 9 or 10 o’clock or so, whereas _aamupäivä _means time between early morning and noon. According to _Kielitoimiston sanakirja_, _aamupäivä _ends at noon, and this corresponds to current practice, but in the old times, aamupäivä had a looser meaning, perhaps ending at midday meal (some time around noon).

Different people probably answer differently if you ask when _aamu _ends and _aamupäivä _starts. I would say 9 o’clock, perhaps mainly because meetings and appointments are seldom scheduled before that – so it can be said to constitute a borderline between early morning and later morning.

I need to add that the greeting (_hyvää_) _huomenta_ is used whole morning, both _aamu _and _aamupäivä_, whereas in poetic use _huomen _means just early morning, _aamu_.


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## theorange4

Thanks for the reply. I'm curious, so huomen is pretty much only used for poetic purposes? Are there other words that only have a "poetic use"? Just curious, because that doesn't necessarily seem to be a thing in English.


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## Spongiformi

theorange4 said:


> Thanks for the reply. I'm curious, so huomen is pretty much only used for poetic purposes? Are there other words that only have a "poetic use"? Just curious, because that doesn't necessarily seem to be a thing in English.



No, I can't talk for Fennofiili nor am I a great poetry expert, but generally speaking if you take a book of poems from a century ago, you will find lots of words that haven't been in common use for great many years. Nowadays someone may try to generate such an old feeling by purposefully inserting words that have dropped out of fashion a long time ago.

I think _huomen_ is a particularly poor example because it's used all the time in various forms and in compound words. Just the basic form _huomen _isn't used anymore to refer to morning. (_Huomenilta = _tomorrow evening, is perfectly okay language.)

Something like _hurme _to refer to blood (_veri_) is a better example of a word that doesn't exist anymore in common language apart from old works or new works trying to give an old or poetic (literary) feeling. Considering English has a bazillion synonoms for a zillion words, I'd find it hard to believe if some of them aren't less used than others, even though they might have been common a century or two ago.


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## theorange4

Gotcha. As for what you said, there are some words like thou that aren't used anymore. Thou, for example, used to be the normal second person singular word until you replaced it as both singular and plural. In the case of thou, it only appears in older forms of English. I just meant that when I looked up huomen, the word (poetic) appeared next to it. I've never seen a word in English described with "poetic", so I thought that maybe Finnish had a separate register for words that are meant to be "poetic". In English we do have words that are more informal and words that are more formal. Usually informal words are germanic and formal are romantic. For example, imagine is less formal than visualize. Begin is informal, while commence is formal. etc...


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## fennofiili

theorange4 said:


> I'm curious, so huomen is pretty much only used for poetic purposes?



Yes, apart from some specialized, adverb-like use. As a normally inflected noun, _huomen _is used only in poetry now, thought it seems to have originally been the normal word for morning before _aamu _came into use.



> Are there other words that only have a "poetic use"? Just curious, because that doesn't necessarily seem to be a thing in English.



Yes, and I think a great many of them are originally words used in Western dialects, often still normal words in them, but not in standard language. For example, _ehtoo _is a Western word for evening, and it was used as a normal word in old written Finnish. Later, when the standard language was developed by selectively introducing words from Eastern dialects, _ilta _became the normal word for evening. The word _ehtoo _was still retained in the Bible (until the 1992 translation), so it slowly became taken as an old-fashioned, even religious word, and it was also regarded as suitable for poetic use – especially since it had fallen into disuse in standard language. There are several stories like that.

In addition, as new loanwords have entered the language, older words may have been left in specialized use and may have been taken into poetic use. When _äiti _was introduced, the old words for mother, _emä _and _emo_, did not completely vanish but are still used e.g. for the mother of an animal, for example, and in poetry also for a human mother.

There are word pairs like _ylkä _– _sulhanen _(bridegroom), _armas _– _rakas _(dear, beloved), and _tuoni _– _kuolema _(death), where the first word is (almost) exclusively poetic.

P.S. Sorry for the long delay in answering. I had a major surgery and I was at a hospital for about two weeks, now slowly recovering at home.


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