Talk:last night
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The following information passed a request for deletion.
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
- It's got a lot of single-word translations, a bit like this one and that one (see above). Fugyoo 16:25, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
- Not a consideration for inclusion. See WT:CFI. Not included in any OneLook monolingual references, except us, WP, and Urban Dictionary. Perhaps it would be part of a phrasebook, for which we don't seem to have sufficient interest for anyone to draft specific criteria for inclusion. DCDuring TALK 17:22, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Note: I've tagged [[last year]] for deletion, linking to this section.—msh210℠ (talk) 04:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Delete both per nom.—msh210℠ (talk) 04:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Keep outside of CFI for its being a translation target. In particular: last night: Basque: bart, Irish: aréir, Slovene: sinoči, Swedish: inatt; last year: Bulgarian: лани, Czech: vloni, Greek: πέρυσι, Hungarian: tavaly. --Dan Polansky 08:25, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Delete since we don't have any applicable, voted-on criteria for such terms, whether in a phrasebook category or any other. No reason for further destruction of CFI and the value of en.wikt as a monolingual dictionary. DCDuring TALK 09:35, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Applying extra-CFI consideration once in a while is no "destruction of CFI" and no "destruction of the value of en.wikt as a monolingual dictionary". It is, in this case, an increase of the value of Wiktionary as a multilingual dictionary, which is what Wiktionary is. You yourself are eager to apply extra-CFI considerations, but under the allegation that they are part of CFI, as seen recently in #ObamaCare, of which you still have not confirmed whether you claim it is a brand. --Dan Polansky 11:29, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
- Keep. Don't get me wrong, I think the main problem here is actually that [[night]] is really missing important information: a reader would have no way of knowing that in English, nights belong to the preceding days (for example, "Sunday night" is adjacent to Monday, not to Saturday). But even once we've addressed that, English time-period deictics are so complicated, arbitrary, and inconsistent that I really think we should include phrases like [[last night]] that are incredibly common and have surprisingly specific meanings. A nonnative speaker might well have difficulty understanding what's wrong with the sentence, "I was so tired yesterday, due to not having slept well last night." —RuakhTALK 14:54, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Keep (also keep [[last year]]) per Ruakh; I do think there's a certain degree of idiomaticity here. "Last night" and "last year" do not mean "final night" and "final year", for example; though "the last night" and "the last year" do and thus are not idiomatic. —Angr 15:18, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- The arguments from a monolingual dictionary perspective seem to mostly merit some kind of improvement to last#Adjective. DCDuring TALK 15:57, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- See diff.—msh210℠ (talk) 16:00, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- The arguments from a monolingual dictionary perspective seem to mostly merit some kind of improvement to last#Adjective. DCDuring TALK 15:57, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, but that usage note isn't what I was getting at with my example. (I mean, it's a good note, and should be kept; but you attribute the example to me, so I feel compelled to note that you're using it to make a different point from mine.) Generally, "last ____" refers to the most recent ____, after discounting the current ____. For example, on 2000 November 1, the literally most recent Halloween was 2000 October 31, but the phrase "last Halloween" still referred to 1999 October 31, because 2000 October 31 was still the current Halloween. ("This Halloween was way more fun than last Halloween!") And different speakers' (or different dialects') conception of which Tuesday is "current" is responsible for the ambiguities in "last Tuesday". (Does it mean "the most recent Tuesday before today", or "the Tuesday closest to one week ago", or "the Tuesday of last week"?) So it might seem surprising that "last night" always means the most recent night; even at 6 A.M., the most recent night is not discounted. Strictly speaking, the phrase "last night" is not actually violating the normal rules of "last"; in English, the current night, the one relative to which all other nights are defined, is the night between today and tomorrow (known as "tonight"), and therefore "last night" refers to the night before that, i.e. the night between yesterday and today. The reason for this is that in English, the night is seen as coming at the end of the day of which it's a part (such that tonight is seen as belonging to today, not to tomorrow, even the parts of tonight that are so far after midnight that you can even refer to them as "the wee hours of tomorrow morning"), and in English, the <time-of-day> considered current is today's <time-of-day> (such that "this afternoon" refers either to an imminent afternoon or to a recent afternoon, but always to the afternoon that shares its day with the present). So it's actually possible to account for the meaning of "last night" with a careful, detailed explanation of "last" and a careful, detailed explanation of "night". And we should strive to include such explanations. But why should someone have to learn every nuance of "last" and every nuance of "night" just to learn the basic meaning of the very common phrase "last night"? (And even once we explain all that, the "decoding" as DCDuring would call it, what about the "encoding"? How is someone supposed to know that yesterday afternoon is "yesterday afternoon", not "last afternoon", and that last night is "last night", not "yesterday night", even in the "evening" sense of "night"? Maybe an appendix? Even if we had one, I'd still find the entry useful.) —RuakhTALK 17:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Ah, thanks for the clarification. Sounds weakly like a good enough reason to keep last night, and add the bulk of what you (Ruakh) just wrote as a usage note to it.—msh210℠ (talk) 18:49, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Actually, not weakly.—msh210℠ (talk) 18:28, 2 October 2011 (UTC)
- Ah, thanks for the clarification. Sounds weakly like a good enough reason to keep last night, and add the bulk of what you (Ruakh) just wrote as a usage note to it.—msh210℠ (talk) 18:49, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry, but that usage note isn't what I was getting at with my example. (I mean, it's a good note, and should be kept; but you attribute the example to me, so I feel compelled to note that you're using it to make a different point from mine.) Generally, "last ____" refers to the most recent ____, after discounting the current ____. For example, on 2000 November 1, the literally most recent Halloween was 2000 October 31, but the phrase "last Halloween" still referred to 1999 October 31, because 2000 October 31 was still the current Halloween. ("This Halloween was way more fun than last Halloween!") And different speakers' (or different dialects') conception of which Tuesday is "current" is responsible for the ambiguities in "last Tuesday". (Does it mean "the most recent Tuesday before today", or "the Tuesday closest to one week ago", or "the Tuesday of last week"?) So it might seem surprising that "last night" always means the most recent night; even at 6 A.M., the most recent night is not discounted. Strictly speaking, the phrase "last night" is not actually violating the normal rules of "last"; in English, the current night, the one relative to which all other nights are defined, is the night between today and tomorrow (known as "tonight"), and therefore "last night" refers to the night before that, i.e. the night between yesterday and today. The reason for this is that in English, the night is seen as coming at the end of the day of which it's a part (such that tonight is seen as belonging to today, not to tomorrow, even the parts of tonight that are so far after midnight that you can even refer to them as "the wee hours of tomorrow morning"), and in English, the <time-of-day> considered current is today's <time-of-day> (such that "this afternoon" refers either to an imminent afternoon or to a recent afternoon, but always to the afternoon that shares its day with the present). So it's actually possible to account for the meaning of "last night" with a careful, detailed explanation of "last" and a careful, detailed explanation of "night". And we should strive to include such explanations. But why should someone have to learn every nuance of "last" and every nuance of "night" just to learn the basic meaning of the very common phrase "last night"? (And even once we explain all that, the "decoding" as DCDuring would call it, what about the "encoding"? How is someone supposed to know that yesterday afternoon is "yesterday afternoon", not "last afternoon", and that last night is "last night", not "yesterday night", even in the "evening" sense of "night"? Maybe an appendix? Even if we had one, I'd still find the entry useful.) —RuakhTALK 17:43, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
- Keep. I second what Ruakh said. To a person speaking English as a 2nd language this term is somewhat confusing, especially whether it means the previous night or the previous evening, e.g. "gestern Abend" or "gestern Nacht" (German) Besides, I think it's useful to have time expressions, which have been deleted before - last week, next week, etc. but it's another story. --Anatoli 06:36, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
- Delete as a full entry, keep as a phrasebook entry I suppose. FWIW where I live you can say yesterday night. Also last night can mean 'the final night' (last night of the Proms). But it seems easily common enough and relevant enough to be a phrasebook entry. Also, if we can't define last and night, we're basically screwed through our own inability. Mglovesfun (talk) 07:00, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
- @ Anatoli: The ambiguity with respect to night or evening does not belong to (deprecated template usage) last night, but to (deprecated template usage) night.
- @ MG: We may indeed be screwed by the difficulty of defining simple words relative to our capabilities. We seem to have trouble even having definitions as good as Webster 1913, whatever the obvious shortcomings of that copyright-free source for contemporarily emerging senses. DCDuring TALK 16:05, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
- Good idea. Let's keep and add to Category:English non-idiomatic translation targets. --Anatoli 04:49, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
- I can see some use for the above category, for example one and a half is translated as one word in, at least three languages, only by having an entry for it an English speaker may learn that it is anderthalb in German, полтора (poltorá)/полторы (poltorý) in Russian and डेढ़ (ḍeṛh) in Hindi. Having last night translated into a few languages is useful for learners, in my opinion. --Anatoli 04:58, 6 September 2011 (UTC)
- This is a very specific idea (noun) and we don't have a single word for it in english but anoche in spanish is just one example of how this is a word in most languages and it is clearly in english too. last+night just means final evening and that makes no sense.Gtroy 10:36, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
- I removed -rfd, since there is no consensus, added to Category:English non-idiomatic translation targets. How do you archive the dicussions? --Anatoli 03:10, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
closed -- Liliana • 18:48, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
the previous night[edit]
Is it possible for last night to mean "the previous night" in reported speech?
Page 516 of the Collins English Usage reads
A place clause usually goes after the main clause. However, in stories, the place clause can be put first Where Kate had stood last night, Maureen now stood
Dickens [Wikisource], in Edwin Drood (p 125) uses 'last night' deictically in a narrative:
The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was back again at sunrise. It was a bright frosty morning. The whole composition before him, when he stood where he had stood last night, was clearly discernible in its minutest details.
Secondly, is this a general use of the adjective last in reported clauses? --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:21, 18 September 2020 (UTC)