Snow, or sort of snow, or nearly snow, or lots of snow... most of us will have had some sort of snow.
As far as I know we only gave a few words for snow in English, but according to the BBC the Scots have 421! When I spent a few seconds researching 'number of words for snow' just now, I wasn't expecting this. Here are a few examples;
feefle - to swirl
flindrikin - a slight snow shower
snaw-pouther - fine driving snow
spitters - small drops or flakes of wind-driven rain or snow
unbrak - the beginning of a thaw
sneesl - just beginning to snow or sleet
skelf - a large snowflake
Well, I can tell you that when that sneesl came on Wednesday morning, the snow fell in large wet skelfs after about half an hour of spitters.
Debussy (another scavenger hunt find!) has a couple of snow pieces.
The Snow Is Dancing from Children's Corner played by Seong-Jin Cho
Des Pas Sur La Neige from Préludes book 1 played by Daniel Baremboim
When I hear words from other languages, I wonder why English seems relatively impoverished. Perhaps it's just the novelty that appeals and the way unfamiliar words feel in the mouth.
ReplyDeleteThe word sneesl is reminiscent of Dutch and German. I th8nk English is a relatively rich language, because of the influences from all over thecworld. But I wonder a lot of our Norse words were lost when French became a court language (although we gained those new words). I think the old words like byre and midden only outside the world of polite society.
Delete