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Most Languages Have No Word for Last Night

8/16/2026 • 3,417 views

Almost every language on Earth has a single word for "yesterday." Not a phrase, not a compound. One word. And in language family after language family, that word turns out to be ancient. Around 1350 BCE, the king of Byblos wrote a panicked letter to Pharaoh Akhenaten, in Akkadian, in cuneiform. The tablet survives in the Louvre as Amarna letter EA 362. Inside it he slips into his native Canaanite for one phrase, shalshami, and writes: "yesterday and the day before, they told me there would be no archers." That bound phrase was already a frozen idiom for the recent past 3,400 years ago. It is in the Hebrew Bible. An Israeli will use it in conversation today. Then it gets strange. Most languages have no single word for "last night" at all. English doesn't. French doesn't. Arabic doesn't. But Hebrew, Scots Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Maori and Samoan each decided those hours deserved their own word, and nobody knows why. And almost every language builds "tomorrow" out of "morning" - Spanish mañana, German morgen, English to-morrow, Russian zavtra. Hebrew doesn't. Where makhar comes from, linguists still disagree. A survey of how languages carve up time, and what the oldest written evidence actually shows. Sources and caveats are noted in the video where the evidence is thin.