Climatic Conditions and Lexis : Some Diachronic Notes on Weather-Related Words in English and Other European Languages

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Focusing on metalinguistic sources and passages with words from the conceptual field of weather in cooccurrence (and including language contrasts), the study analyses whether changes in weather-related lexemes in English language history, particularly words for “weather, condition of the air,” “cloud,” and “mist,” may be related to climatic conditions. This is supported for the following cases: (1) the use of the lexeme for “weather” in the sense of “fair weather” in the so-called Medieval Warm Period (950–1250); (2) changes among “cloud” words: welkin, cloud, sky, and rack “mass of cloud moving quickly” toward or at the beginning of the Little Ice Age (1250s–1450); and (3) changes among “mist” words: the revived rime “hoar frost, frozen mist, chill mist, or fog,” the metaphorical use of fog “long grass left uncut” for “thick clouds of water vapor” and the figurative use of haze “body of dust” for “fog, thick mist” during the Tudor Inflation (1525–1600).