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MoinMoin

The TODO list for MoinMoin is on [MoinMoin]MoinMoinTodo. You are encouraged to add wishes and ideas to [MoinMoin]MoinMoinIdeas.

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"Moin" meaning "Good Morning", and "MoinMoin" being an emphasis, i.e. "A Very Good Morning". The name was obviously chosen for its [MoinMoin]WikiWikiNess.

We may soon be sure what it means because it maybe added to the German Duden as i read in todays newspaper. Or Newspaper does not have the article online but i found a snippet in another (better) one: [WWW]"Moin moin" soll in den Duden --[MoinMoin]PatrickGuenther

No! Originally "MoinMoin" does not mean "Good Morning". "Moin" just means "good" or "nice" and in northern Germany it is used at any daytime, so "Good day" seems more appropriate. -- [MoinMoin]MarkoSchulz

Mmmmh , seems that I can enrich so more info: "Moin" has the meaning of "Good Morning" but it is spoken under murmur like "mornin'" although the Syllable is too short alone, so it is spoken twice. If you shorten "Good Morning" with "morn'" it has the same effect with "morn'morn'". --Thomas Albl

We use it all day in the south too. I always thought it just morphed from a morning greeting to an all-day one. -- [MoinMoin]JürgenHermann

Interesting. I always get puzzled looks from southerners when I use it in the evening. My wife - who speaks more [WWW]Plattdeutsch than me - once explained to me, that MoinMoin originated in "Moi Dag" or "Moin Dag", which just means "Good day". I don't know whether the people were too lazy or just mumbled too much, anyway it degenerated into "Moin" or in its emphasized form "MoinMoin".

The whole thing gets more complicated since there are so many different flavors of Plattdeutsch. Someone from Hamburg might have a hard time understanding someone from the coast.-- [MoinMoin]MarkoSchulz

Sure. Here in Oldenburg we use it all-day and if somebody uses MoinMoin quite sure somebody else will ask him not to use it because in our Area it is another way of saying "Leck mich am Arsch" - i don't know how to translate it... -- [MoinMoin]PatrickGuenther

Sorry for barging in here, but I guess that is the idea with this anyhow :) I'm from the southern part of Denmark and we also use the term "Moin" - even though we spell it "Mojn"... but i guess that's because a lot of our language is influenced by Platt -- [MoinMoin]JørnHansen

Well, Platt is surely an extreme German dialect (or even its own language), so I guess it's no surprise.

Swedish has the greeting "morn morn", which is a sloppy way of saying "morgon morgon", which means "morning morning" and is thus used to greet people during the early hours. Coincidence? -- [MoinMoin]ChristianSunesson

How is moinmoin pronounced? [Although it's an open question as to how to represent the phonemes across Swedish, Danish, Plattdeutsch and English... although probably not impossible as they are all 'Germanic' languages...] --Nicholas Spies

It's pronounced the way you spell it... m as in my, oi as oy in doytshmark, n as in nuts :).

BTW, one could resolve to accepting *both* theories on The Origin Of MoinMoin---taking into account the nearness in both sound and meaning over several neighbouring languages (Platt, H.-German, Dutch, Swedish, English...). Platt used to be the lingua franca of the Hanse (an early, nautically and commercially oriented ancestor of today's Internet), and a lot of words must have been shared among the people engaged in the international trade across the North and Baltic Seas.--- G.: 'Morgen': early day, next day.--- E.: 'next morn' approx.= next day (cf. also E.: 'day' in 'day and night' vs. 'day' in 'every day').--- Perhaps moinmoin even comes from 'moin morn'?---In (N.) Germany, one often says 'Morgen, Tag, Abend' (in IPA spelling: [mo:en, tax, a:mt]) instead of the more polite and more carefully pronounced, official forms 'Guten Morgen' and so on.

--Wolfgang Lipp [lipp@epost.de]

In Scots, 'morn' can mean either morning or tomorrow. Thus the morn's morn is tomorrow morning.

--Hamish Lawson

Let´s have a look at van Dale Taalweb (Van Dale Groot woordenboek hedendaags Nederlands):

mooi (bn.)

So mooi dag means good day, and MoinMoin seems to be a residual form of this form of greeting.

--GFH