Ytukyg

I have seen on Facebook, a post (in French) claiming that many words for the night are based on a n+respective number for the number 8. For example on this website,

Language      Number 8  night

français        huit    nuit 

anglais         eight   night 

allemand        acht    nacht

espagnol        ocho    noche 

portugais       oito    noite

italien         otto    notte

néerlandais     acht    nacht

suédois         aetta   natta 

roumain         opt     noapte

wallon          ût      nut 

occitan         uèch    nuèch 

catalan         vuit    nit 

gascon          ueit    nueit 

picard          uit     nuit 

piedmontais     eut     neuit 

espéranto       ok      nokto

The post goes even further, claiming that N is a symbol for infinity, and that 8 is the typical infinity symbol rotated.

My first reaction was to dismiss it. But then, I've been thinking about it, and would really like to have reasons to dismiss it.

The infinity symbol dates from 1655 (according to Wikipedia)whereas the word nuit was already in use by 1170 (website in French). Furthermore, the word nuit was used as noit in older French, and derives from noctum (latin) and thus nox (littré in French). But unfortunately, my knowledge of Latin is by far too limited to investigate further on the Latin.

Actually, the last link mentions that for the author M. Ad. Regnier, studying the Sanskrit, it could be related to the word naked (German: nackt, Latin: nuda).

In English, (the ight deriving from eight sounds worse than some other examples), what I gather is that

Old English niht (West Saxon neaht, Anglian næht, neht) "night, darkness [...] from Proto-Germanic *nahts

which relate as well to nox (Latin), nuks (Old Greek) or naktam (Sanskrit). The same website also indicates that

according to Watkins, probably from a verbal root *neg- "to be dark, be night."

But, if the relation night -> infinity -> infinity symbol -> 8 -> night, sounds improbable, I cannot find definitive information on a possible relation between the number 8 and the night.

Can you help me get down to the bottom of that question?

No, they are unrelated.

Some Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) reconstructions from Wiktionary:

• "eight": "oḱtṓw" (claimed to be a dual of "four fingers")


• "night": "nókʷts" (possibly from "bare, naked")

As @Schmuddi mentioned in a comment above, it looks just like a coincidence (slightly similar proto-language words). The rest looks like an urban legend.

In English "eight" and "night" came from different words, "ehte" and "niht" respectively, which have both undergone a common substitution of -gh- for a hard "h", which was a Middle English scribal habit.

In French, "huit" came from "uit" when an "h" was added to avoid confusion with "vit". As for "nuit", it's a transformation of old French "nuict" derived from latin "noctem", which is an inclination of "nox".

The etymological link can be tracked further down, but the two words remain distinct, albeit similar.

So at least for English and French, the similarity between these two words is not due to a common root, but rather to similar ancestor words, and in some cases common transformations which contributed to the similarity of modern forms. I don't know other languages in your list, but they all seem to be either Latin or Germanic, so they likely share their etymological transformation with French and English respectively.

To pile on the answers debunking a particular language:
The list misspells both Swedish words to make them look more similar than they are. "Åtta" (number eight) is misspelled as "aetta" and "natt" (night) is misspelled as "natta".

"Åtta" /ˈɔtːa/ and "natt" /nat:/ are not very alike as I'm sure most will agree.

Count this as another vote for occam's razor and this being an urban legend.

(Source: My Swedish dictionary. Wiktionary unfortunately is short on IPA for these but consider it "common knowledge"...)

Basically, what the poster has noted is that something like the Indo-European language family exists, and they're only looking in Western to Central Europe. For extra credit they could have spotted Basque, Finnish and Hungarian as outliers [GoogleTranslate gives me zortzi/gauean, kahdeksan/yö-, nyolc/éjszaka respectively for the pairs].

Basically language evolution isn't chaotic: If you start from two similar words in a language, then you have a better than good chance they are similar in a descended language as well, especially for old everyday words. Just like irregular verbs have a tendency of becoming more regular (within a language) over the generations, a population changes all its words in a related fashion when it's inadvertently developing a new language: Like Castilian Spanish not using V, any imported word with a V gets similarly changed (if it stays in use); most Spanish words originally starting on "SP" will now start on "ESP" (Spagna -> España), and "disport" remained "deportive" where the rest of Europe shortened to "sport".

So if you group all Latin descendants together (I looked at Romanian as it's often similar to Italian to my ears, yet I see why it wasn't included in the list!!), there's not much left.

Then you look at Latin's direct ancestor (and not a reconstructed indo-european root language), ancient Greek... There we have νῠ́ξ ("nux") that clearly caused Latin nox (and modern Greek "Nýchta", which I named my white cat) and ὀκτώ ("okto") that are practically unchanged in Latin and modern Greek, and I can only shrug my shoulders at the claim.

I have to say they were lucky with English and Germanic here: Often the word is very different in Germanic and Frankish roots, and it's a 50-50 coin toss which of the two will get used (German Kirche, Dutch Kerk and Scots Kirk go with English Church; where Latin Ecclesia gives French Église, Spanish Iglesia, Italian Chiesa). Or in verbs, where English often resembles more the perfect past than French does: e.g., Latin Neglegere (perfect: Neglectus) --> French Négliger and English To neglect.

[EDIT: I have not sourced as earlier comments pointed out that Wiktionary sources are discouraged/distrusted here.. It's already rather long and the previous posts have already debunked the argument, so it adds further background that is for the Skeptic to check!! You wouldn't be a skeptic if you believed my argument because of my personally-chosen and possibly -edited link? (Too meta?)]