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“Sumer is icumen in,

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweth sed, and bloweth med,

And springth the wude nu.”

Summer in Canada! But the ancient lyrics above are British, words of a familiar Middle English round sung at Reading Abbey gateway every year since 1250. We Canadians have to push the estival envelope. We have but four summer months. So we start on the very blade of summer —and early. This week seems a good time to review the origin of the names of our seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter, along with other associated words.

A season in Old French, seson, was a time of sowing, from the Latin noun satio, sationis ‘seed-time.’ The labels of our seasons are among the oldest words in English, except for autumn.

Autumn we borrowed from Latin autumnus ‘the harvest time of plenty.’ The ancient Romans deemed autumn related to the verb augere ‘to increase,’ because the crops increase and give their yield at harvest time. Modern etymologists at first dismissed this explanation as a quaint folk etymology. Many now think it might just be correct. Others say the Romans originally named the fall season vertumnus from vertere ‘to turn,’ since it is the season when the weather turns from warm to cold. But they kept getting their seasonal name vertumnus mixed up with an Etruscan god of the seasons named Vertumnus (similar in form but stemming from quite different Etruscan roots—we think). So the Romans altered the first syllable and made the word autumnus. Such a crafty transformation would be unique to Latin word formation. Events that appear to be unique in linguistic history, that lie far beyond the common rules of phonological evolution and deduced derivation, are to be treated with initial academic caution. It is perhaps best to settle for etymologist Eric Partridge’s shrug on the subject of the word autumn: ‘o.o.o.’ — of obscure origin. Fall, now chiefly North American for the season when leaves fall, did begin in England as a synonym for autumn in the middle of the sixteenth century.

 

 

Spring springs from the springing up of new green plants.

Summer, Sommer, etc. are widespread in Germanic languages and related words pepper Indo-European where the PIE root *sam, a variation of *sem, seems to mean simply ‘summer.’

The French word for summer été is the form that evolved in France from the Latin aestas ‘summer,’ itself a reflex of the Proto-Indo-European morpheme *aidh ‘burn, be hot.’ Latin aestivalis gives both French and English the learned adjective estival ‘pertaining to summer, happening in summer.’

The PIE root *aidh appears in ancient Greek as aithein ‘to burn, to shine, to kindle’ and prompted the name of an African country, Ethiopia. The Greeks and Romans thought of it as the ‘land of sun-burnt faces,’ for the ancients believed the dark-complexioned peoples of Africa were black because they had been permanently sun-burned(!). Is there racist reference in the name Ethiopia then? Probably. Aith is a morpheme carrying the semantic weight ‘burnt’ and opis is a Greek word for ‘outward appearance’ or ‘face.’ Sharing the same Greek root aith is the name of the once common anaesthetic, ether. To the ancient Greeks aither was the substance of the upper air. Greeks thought the moon and the stars were made of aither. When the Romans borrowed the word as aether they used it to mean the pure bright air of the upper skies, still a ravishing canopy flung over fair Italian days. Roman poets used aether to mean ‘heaven.’ And there is the origin of our English adjective ethereal ‘heavenly, celestial, airy.’

English supplies verbs to describe what the critters do seasonally. To hibernate is to pass the winter in a state of torpor. To estivate is to the pass the summer so. But we need a verb to describe what many do all the year round. With due humility, I suggest totannate from Latin, totum ‘all’ + annus ‘year’ meaning to pass the whole year in a state of torpor.

Winter’s root is wet, literally. The same Germanic root that gives our words water and wet makes the first vowel nasal and so adds an ‘n’, thus *ued > *wet > *went > *wint > winter. Or winter may stretch all the way back to a root form in Proto-Indo-European *ueid that gives Celtic words for ‘white’; compare for example Old Irish find ‘white’ and many other Celtic cognates like Welsh gwyn ‘white’ and perhaps even the Druids ‘people of the white oak’ from *dru-ueid or oak-white. Dru means ‘oak tree’ and there are two PIE morphemes represented as *ueid. The second *ueid means ‘know, see.’ One of its reflexes in English is the word wit with its prime meaning of insight. In Latin, PIE *ueid displays as videre ‘to see.’ Take *dru and *ueid compounded to make the word Druid, and the Druids could be the ‘oak-knowers’ based on their veneration of the oak tree and its mistletoe.

 

Robin Storm: A Canadian Phrase

You’ve opened the cottage, primed the pump, set the summer chairs on the new cedar deck, shared a christening goblet of Château Qui Sait?, and, just as you settle into the hammock to imbibe the piney brio of it all, a thick snow squall blows in across the lake to welcome the start of June. It’s a late-in-the-season storm familiar to most Canadians, and some call it a robin storm, in an attempt to lessen its chill by invoking one of our cheerful spring birds, the robin.

 

Copyright © 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

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