The Season with Two Names
Summer is over and winter hasn’t yet arrived. Do you call this season autumn or fall? And why does it have two names?
The names of our two extreme seasons, winter and summer, are very old words. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language originated from around 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Summer comes from the PIE root sem, which means half. This suggests that in Europe, there were originally only two seasons. The root sem transformed into many similar words such as sumor, sumar, and somer.
Winter comes from the PIE root wed, which means water, wet, or rainy. It was similarly transformed with the English word winter coming from the Proto-Germanic wintruz.
The other two seasons are relatively recent additions. There were no distinct English words for spring or fall until the 16th century.
Descriptions of springtime first appeared in Early Modern English, from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Numerous words such as vere, primetide, and lenten described springtime. According to Earl R. Anderson in his book Folk Taxonomies in Early English, this variety of terms suggests spring was unimportant compared to winter and summer.
The same applies to fall. It was sometimes described as the time for harvest, but harvest referred to an activity and not to a season.
Autumn first appeared in English around the late 14th and early 15th centuries. It coexisted with harvest as a loose description of the season for another 200 years.
Fall first shows up in the mid-16th century in England as the fall of the leaf, which was shortened to just fall. Like harvest, it was descriptive. But it also evoked a poetic sense of what made this season different.
The recognition of fall/autumn as a distinct season started in England at the same time the American colonies began to separate linguistically from British English.
Noah Webster, of Webster’s Dictionary, was an ardent spelling reformer. His work was sensible and logical (center instead of centre, for example). But he was also politically motivated to differentiate American English from British English. By the mid-19th century, Americans commonly used fall and the British commonly used autumn.
The Shot
Last week, friend and fellow photographer Jon Christofersen and I walked into the Hovland Woods Scenic and Natural Area near Grand Marais, Minnesota. We were in search of fall color.
The Woods are home to over a dozen native plant communities. Aspen-birch forest blankets roughly half of the 1,280 acres. Because nearby Lake Superior moderates the climate affording cooler summers, milder winters and higher humidity, a sugar maple hardwood forest can exist there.
After a pleasant hike, we arrived at the sugar maple forest. We had the occasional reds we were looking for to compliment the vibrant yellows, oranges, and greens of other leaves and the blue of the sky.
Pointing our cameras upwards and using the edge of a tree to produce a sun star, we rejoiced in being there and in capturing some of Minnesota’s beauty.
Thanks for looking,
Chuck Derus