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Heat, heat, thunderstorm, heat...
Jul. 21st, 2010 08:20 pmSo far, this week has consisted of days that are hot as sin, broken up by storms that come and go as suddenly as the flicking of a light switch. Half an hour after a storm, the puddles are all gone.
No zephyrs today, only siroccos.
English is an awesome language, in that it has both a word for a gentle, cooling breeze (zephyr), and a dry, hot breeze that merely moves heat around (sirocco). Zephyr is from the Greeks; Zephyrus was one of the four wind gods. Interestingly enough, we don't use the other three names for their respective winds. Notus and Eurus (north and east) didn't really get a lot of mentions in Greek mythology. Boreas is famous mostly because he once kidnapped an Athenian princess.
Sirocco is Italian in origin, but the word was picked up by the Greeks and passed along to us that way. A sirocco was originally just wind coming north from the African Sahara, but that kind of wind does tend to have a certain set of characteristics.
Grr. I can't find the article now, but apparently, some linguists did a study and found that English is a sort of apex predator among languages. While most languages will die out in certain situations, such as when a large majority of the population speaks another language, English always survives. Even more, English tends to eat the other language involved, strengthening its own grammar with the acquired structures and growing fat on the vocabulary. The joke about English mugging other languages in dark alleys and going through their pockets for loose grammar is actually mostly right.
And I love that English has so many words, with so many duplicates. How many words do you need for different kinds of winds? Probably not that many, but it makes poetry and prose livelier to have the variety.
No zephyrs today, only siroccos.
English is an awesome language, in that it has both a word for a gentle, cooling breeze (zephyr), and a dry, hot breeze that merely moves heat around (sirocco). Zephyr is from the Greeks; Zephyrus was one of the four wind gods. Interestingly enough, we don't use the other three names for their respective winds. Notus and Eurus (north and east) didn't really get a lot of mentions in Greek mythology. Boreas is famous mostly because he once kidnapped an Athenian princess.
Sirocco is Italian in origin, but the word was picked up by the Greeks and passed along to us that way. A sirocco was originally just wind coming north from the African Sahara, but that kind of wind does tend to have a certain set of characteristics.
Grr. I can't find the article now, but apparently, some linguists did a study and found that English is a sort of apex predator among languages. While most languages will die out in certain situations, such as when a large majority of the population speaks another language, English always survives. Even more, English tends to eat the other language involved, strengthening its own grammar with the acquired structures and growing fat on the vocabulary. The joke about English mugging other languages in dark alleys and going through their pockets for loose grammar is actually mostly right.
And I love that English has so many words, with so many duplicates. How many words do you need for different kinds of winds? Probably not that many, but it makes poetry and prose livelier to have the variety.
