Did you know the word “Night” means no + eight, in every language. Now ask yourself, “why?”

I was just thinking about this and decided it's worth sharing.

I found a language in Europe where this doesn't work, strengthening the mostly "Indo-European" lineage explanation.

It took a language isolate in Northern Spain, but I present you this neat trick in Basque.

No = ez
Eight = zortzi
Night = gaua

And I meant Latin alphabet. It's specific to the languages using the Latin alphabet not Greek.

And here's some others for fun. It doesn't work too well in Indo-European languages using other alphabets, like Hindi and Greek.

Hindi:

No = nahin
Eight = aath
Night = raat

Greek:

No = óchi
Eight = októ
Night = nýchta

Arabic: (semitic)

No = la
Eight = thamaniat
Night = laylatan

And when you get to daughter languages of one's it use to work in it falls apart like a copy of a copy.

Haitian Creole (Via French)

No = non
Eight = uit
Night = lannwit

Even Welsh starts getting wonky...

No = na
Eight = wyth
Night = nos

Short of it: Works best in most Indo-European languages that use the Latin alphabet. To be an annoying internet know-it-all the theory put forth is a "false dilemma".

a reply to: Degradation33


taking your post a tiny bit further, i like dialects more than homogiblob languages i've played with this on and off in some dialects tracking back to earlier periods sennit is a shorthand for a week or seven nights that has remained in some to this days in the now archaic sennight or week.. it seems to repeat the days where referred to as nights in the same way we say to children its x sleeps to christmas and a women is with child not with baby/day is a word/concept that appeared much later...

i find archaic use very interesting as they paint their own story.. looking at numbers and counting from local angles the sheep countries/ now counties have their own evolved particular forms of counting, at school we learned 2 forms of counting the local and the homogi blob english, the local one is One-erum, two-erum, Cock-erum, Shoe-erum, Sith-erum, Sath-erum. past 10 the local counting starts 2 etc which msde learning french counting at school easy..

so for the other parts of the wider country we have these various counting words..

picking on 8 for the op the number 8 is:
wilts, Laura| scots, Hovera | lakes, Owera | dales Overro | welsh Wyth and my downlands, Winebury.

given the importance of farming food/tally stick counting these numbers would have been integral to those cultures, i suspect we'll find similar disparities across europe that are equally visible but forgotten today academia cleansed homogi blob languages.

Santa Clause has won stronger arguments.

originally posted by: AlexandrosTheGreat
Um I would think night came from ΝΥΧΤΑ in Greek, my first language.

The Greek Word " έρεβος " could denote the same Meaning .