etymology - Why “daily” and not “dayly”?


Checking how adjectives related to time are created, I see:



  • year → yearly

  • month → monthly

  • week → weekly

  • day → daily


Why has “day” been derived into “daily” with an ‘i’ instead of “dayly” with a ‘y’?


In the Online Etymology Dictionary I don't see information related to this ‘loss’ of the ‘y’ in favour of the ‘i’:



daily (adj.)


Old English dæglic (see day). This form is known from compounds: twadæglic “happening once in two days,” þreodæglic “happening once in three days;” the more usual Old English word was dæghwamlic, also dægehwelc. Cognate with German täglich.




Answer



From the quoted definitions at etymonline, I would suspect that you may be asking the wrong question :)


If I look at the related words in other languages (dag, Tag) for day, it seems the final g has changed into a [j]. The same seems to have happened with (Dutch) leggen -> English lay.


As it is normally pronunciation that defines spelling, and not the other way around, it seems that the i did the job of representing that [j] in daily quite well. However, as a final vowel, the i seems to be uncommon in English, and usually written as a y. (Compare Dutch hooi to English hay).


So where dæglic became daily (the final [k] became [i]), dæg became day. In both cases the g got to be pronounced as [j], but instead of dai, hai or gai, the use of y was preferred to write that sound in a final position.


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