Evening/Night (was Re: The "Mother" Problem)

In Swedish too, we've got problems with an old genitive functioning
as a temporal adverbial: "dags" = '(it is) time (to do sth)'.
A lot of people write it "dax" naturally as pronounced, something
which is severely condemned by preservers of correct language,
including the Academy
(and also my word program which insists on correcting my spelling –
and I am not very clever at taking away such annoying functions on
my computer).

There is an inconvenience, however, with this conservative sticking
to "dags": if you want to translate it into other languages and look
it up in a dictionary, you will find no such word. It isn't
recognized as a word, and you have to look up "dag" = 'day', and
there find "dags" = time to.
Very stupid, since there is very little relation etymologically
between 'day' and 'time to get sth done'.

I myself have argued for recognizing this as a seperate word and
with the correct phonetic spelling "dax". This is also practiced by
many people and in commercials. And the Romans didn't hesitate to
write "rex", even closer to other forms "reg-" constituting the same
word.

For the Academy there seems to be one unsurmountable obstacle,
though:
what word class is it? A noun? An adverbial? What? How to classify
it as a separate word?

The use of it is in sentences restricted to predictative:
"(det är) dax (att)", '(it is) time (to)'.
(Once again the computer corrected my spelling! Arrgh!)

Well, in the Slavic languages there seems to be some adverbials
labelled as the word class predicative:
Russian "nuzhno", "nado", "vidno", "mne kholodno" and many others,
used with a "it is …" sousentendu.
(What about "necesse" in Latin grammar?)

This might perhaps be a solution for the Swedish Academy: to
give "dags" the status of a sovereign word belonging as the only one
in Swedish to the word class predicative.

Well, this hyperboreal problem is perhaps of little interest world
wide, but perhaps Torsten (who has previously praised the Academy
for organizing the passive/deponent system so well) might comment on
this inflexibility.

Now it's "dax" (arrgh) to have a cup of coffee …

Lars