good morning/afternoon/night

Question

I am always wondering why we have to say

buenos dias for good morning buenas tardes for good afternoon buenas noches for good night

it seems like dia is feminine while tardes and noches are masculine. Moreover we are talking about a single day/night etc. Then how come we have to pluralize them?

Thanks.

Answer 1

To tell you the truth, with regard to Lazarus' response, I am not at all sure why we say "good morning" in English. I would guess that this is surely a shortened form from something spoken as a complete sentence in some earlier...long time ago English. And what about "good-bye". (Was it God Be With You?)

Linguistic phenomena might often just be historical.

In Spanish one does indeed say "¡Que tenga buen día!" (At least that is what I think I am hearing the local gentleman at the Burgerking where I pick up my morning coffee wishing me.)

• It is shortened: ¡(Espero) que tenga un buen día! = I hope you'll have a nice day! - lazarus1907 14 de Ago, 2009

Answer 2

buenos dias for good morning buenas tardes for good afternoon buenas noches for good night

You are using the typical argument "If it works in my language, why doesn't in yours?". Well, take a language with a simpler grammar, like Chinese, and from their point of view you can find thousands of things like these to ask, and particularly about plurals like this. There is no simple explanation for this, just accept it, trust me.

Answer 3

The only insight I have is that Día is not feminine. It is masculine. Just a thought, maybe it's buenos días because the morning time has more than one hour in it? The same with afternoon hours and night hours (I am totally guessing on the second part). I know that día is one of those "crazy" masculine words that "looks" feminine. Good luck with the question.