Where Do Words for Seasons Come From?

Common themes across European languages

The words for spring, summer, autumn and winter broadly mean ‘early season,’ ‘late season,’ ‘harvest’ and ‘white season.’ There are some variations. This is usually between the Romance (French, Italian, Spanish), Germanic (English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Danish) and Slavic (Polish) language groups. This is illustrated in the examples in the table here:

What do the commonalities tell us about the origins of seasons?

The first conclusion that we can reach, when looking at the similarities is that our common ancestors all had one experience in common, across the whole of Europe. You’ll notice that the words for winter share unifying characteristics, all of which show that it was a cold, white, snowy time of the year.

It also seems that having a distinction between a spring and a summer season was equally as important. Calvert Watkins, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and the Classics at Harvard University and Professor-in-Residence at UCLA, makes a note of this in an essay ‘Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans,’ in which he explains: “The seasons were distinguished in Indo-European: ghei-, ‘winter,’ wes-, ‘spring’ and sem-, ‘summer.’ The Indo-Europeans knew snow in their homeland; the word sneigwh- is nearly ubiquitous,” he adds.¹

On the other hand, autumn is the subject of much more uncertainty among language historians. It is the most varied here in terms of its meaning in individual languages. Certainly, a notion of ‘harvest time’ is evident for some groups – however, whether this is enough to warrant being a season in its own right in earlier cultures is not certain.

Who were the Indo-Europeans?

We think of early Indo-Europeans as a hunter-gatherer group who represent our earliest common ancestors. Similarities in languages in both Europe and parts of India have led to the conclusion that all these languages come from a single mother tongue used within an Indo-European group, who would have then travelled and spread. However, where might they have come from? And can clues in the languages tell us more about them?

Well, a document from the department of linguistics at Oregon University concludes, from the evidence of words such as seasons – as well as other word groups, that “[…] the Indo-Europeans were originally an inland people. They lived in a temperate climate, which had seasons and the kinds of plants and animals which are native to temperate climates. They farmed, had herds of domesticated animals, and moved around in wagons drawn by oxen. (Notice that there are cognates for all the major parts of a wagon in modern Indo-European languages!)”²

Further linguistic and archaeological research shows that these peoples would have understood highly sophisticated concepts. Beyond seasons, their words tell us that they recognized the existence of ‘the soul,’ for example. They certainly believed in gods of one type or another and they adhered to a certain degree of moral and philosophical ideals. This all reveals a high level of cultural development. They probably also had some limited use of copper and they would have utilized ‘honed’ tools of some kind in their farming methods.

All the evidence here means that we can date early Indo-European culture to roughly 3,500-2,500 BC, even if we cannot be fully certain about the region in which they actually lived.

An introduction to comparative linguistics

Looking at and comparing words in order to make assumptions about history is known as comparative linguistics. However, while it can provide the impetus to explore certain ideas, comparative linguistics alone cannot unfortunately provide a full set of answers. Nevertheless, the hints are always interesting and the way in which the relationships between the words weave their own background stories are fascinating.

You can become carried away with such observations, of course. As linguists warn, “Unfortunately, archaeological evidence can never provide absolute information about the language of illiterate speakers. The linguistic evidence from cognate sets provides intriguing clues, but who the Indo-Europeans were and where they came from will always remain something of a mystery.”

Footnotes

1. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans by Calvert Watkins – DocsLib
2. Quoted in the same article as above