Clouds Rain Mist
April 25th 2008 03:00
Clouds Rain Mist
and wordsfrom several languages to describe them!
and wordsfrom several languages to describe them!
It's still raining in Sydney! Has anyone noticed English is limited in some ways when it comes to weather vocabulary. Oh there's lots of loan words from Latin and Greek to describe this imbriferous ombrophoric weather with a continuously nimbosous homichlessetic sky !(Actually I just borrowed some of those words from Latin and Greek!)
Compared to Chinese Indoeuropean languages seem rather limited.
English has rain mist fog drizzle cloud. Latin has imber nubes nebula and nimbus along with pluvia. Greek has huei - it rains and epombria and psakas for drizzle and also huetos nephos and nephele. Modern Greek shortened and changed ombrros to brohi but kept nefosand homihli. Gaelic has words like fearthainn to rain and baisti and baiseach and sian neul and ceoban or ceobhran.
Chinese however wins the prize if there was one!?
There's a word just for weather that implies rain and shows a cloud pouring rain radical 173 YU. The Japanese changed this into U and use the same cahracter to write ame and ama and same in various compounds. Viet has Vu and mua, Hokkien Ho, and Hakka Wu .
Na3 is drizzle. Fen1 is fine misty drizzle. Pei is pouring torrential rain. Lin in mandarin which becomes lam and lim in other dialects means a long spell of continuous rain which the Japanese call Rin or nagaame. Xia is the word ofr thin layes of clouds and mist which is the character the Japanese use to write kasumi a word often used in haiku which cna also be translated as haze or rosy thin clouds.
Cloud is YUN. Yin is a long period of continual drizzling or heavy rain lasting for over ten days. That's Jam in Cantonese and dam in Viet. Very appropriate for Sydney weather!
Another word for drizzle is meng.
Something I would like to see is a Ni, Ngai, Gei, Nghe,or niji, a RAINBOW!
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