Word of the Day

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Second and vteřina

It occurred to me that Czech vteřina (second, as in minutes, seconds and hours) is related to the ordinal second (which brings me to the question: why did they choose second over all other ordinal numbers to name a unit of time?). Second in Russian is второй (vtoroy). Even though second as a number is druhý in Czech, you still see that stem under disguise in úterý (Tuesday), related to Polish wtorek and Russian вторник.

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