https://viewsproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/20/snow-signs/ Skip to content Search for: [ ] [Search] The VIEWS project The VIEWS project Menu * About * The team * Contact us * Endangered Writing Network * Resources / CREWS project * Visiting Fellowship * Your stories * Conferences [jarwithsnow] December 20, 2024December 22, 2024 viewsproject Posts on writing Snow signs Well it's midwinter, and those of us in the northern hemisphere tend to like a bit of snow at this time of year. Love it or hate it, it's taken on an iconic status for winter, with picturesque white landscapes such as that longed for by Bing Crosby. But what do you call it and how do you write it down? Even if you don't experience snow often or at all, you may have a word for it. Join us for a selective tour of snow words and signs around the world. We begin with the Oracle Bone Script in Shang China. Glowing molten bronze, crackling bonfire for sacrificial rituals, and dry specula being scorched for divination--Shang China from the Late Bronze Age is a culture of fire. The Book of Odes, one of the Confucianist classics, vividly portents its conquering king: "The Martial King then set out, killingly he grasped the axe: he was like fire so blazing: and so there was nobody who could dare to check us". Yet amid this culture of blazing heat, we find a surprising contrast: the soft elegance of snowflakes, beautifully preserved in Shang oracle bone script. The oracle script character for 'snow' has intrigued scholars for centuries. Its exact components are still debated, but one thing is clear--it was festive and beautiful. The squarish upper part of the sign is the sky--not unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphic sky sign. But unlike its Egyptian counterpart, what falls from the sky are not only rain drops, but also something resembling feathers. And this is what snow probably meant for Shang people: something light and soft, swirling all its way down elegantly. [variousofsnowfromobs-forblog] Philologically speaking, the feathers also evoke the word hui Hui , the comet--another celestial phenomenon with a feather-like tail. In the word "snow" Xue , it also indicates the pronunciation "hui". Thus the character embodies multiple layers of meaning, blending both sound and imagery to convey the lightness of the snow. In the next two millennia since the snowflake among the blazing Shang, snow became the very signature of romanticised winter. Here, made around the 11th century in northern China, this wine jug (below) that once witnessed countless merry-makings and joyful drinking parties bears four characters on its smooth body: Breeze Feng , Flower Hua , Snow Xue and Moon Yue . This is shorthand for "Flowers of spring, Breeze of summer, Moon of autumn and Snow of winter". [jarwithsnow]Jar with four loops, Suzhou Museum, Anhui, China. It is simple, but romantically beautiful, because as one turning this jar, the four seasons pass in front of eyes in a cycle. Some lines from a drama, The Story of Fish Basket, around the same time caption this turning of seasons sorrowfully: "Spring, summer, autumn, winter--the four seasons flow, Wind, flowers, snow, and moon follow each other in close succession. The Yangtze never shows its waters turning back, Once aged, how can one return to youth again?" The feathery quality of snow in the Oracle Bone Script sign is also evident in another nearby writing system, Dongba, used by the Naxi people of southern China. Dongba signs individually depict the words and ideas they represent and Dongba manuscripts seem to come alive with beautiful and intricate stories. Below you can see a page from a manuscript called the Geeq Kul saq, the origin story of the god Geeq Kul. The weather plays a significant role in this story, as the black egg from which Geeq Kul hatched needed exposure to the elements to gestate. [dongba2]Page 15 of the Geeq Kul Saq manuscript, Or. 26.029, Leiden Digital Collections manuscript viewer. Can you find the sign for snow in one of the panels in the above page? It looks like this (and you can also find an animated version in the first video here courtesy of Leiden university library): [dongba_symbol_for__snow_]Dongba sign for snow, image from Wikipedia. It is interesting that snow is depicted in a way that reflects not only its visual appearance but also the way it feels and the way it moves through the air. In areas where snow is a common phenomenon, different types and qualities of snow can be very important. For example, in Canada there are numerous Inuktitut words for types of snow, many of which relate to the level of danger or inconvenience snow may cause: piqsirniq/piqsirniq "blizzard", siurnaq/sioraq "slush", siku/siko "sleet", sikualuk/sikoalok "icicle", aputiup qaanga/apotiop qaanga "snowdrift" and aputiryuaq/apotiryoaq "snowstorm" to name a few. I chose Inuktitut for the distinctive syllabic writing system used, which features in local signage. I couldn't find a sign with a snow word explicitly but I did find one with a polar bear warning! [inuktitut]Bilingual polar bear warning sign in Inuktitut and English, from here. Moving towards Scandinavia, the runic alphabets contain a sign with the name iss (from a reconstructed earlier form isaz), meaning "ice", and denoting the first sound of the word (i). The letter may be related to the yod/iota of the Mediterranean alphabets, but such links are difficult to establish even though they have long been hypothesised. The association with ice is special to the runic letter, at least - the yod of Phoenician and Hebrew seems to have been associated with the word for "hand". You can see the iss sign, which simply looks like a vertical line or letter I, in this early inscription which hit the headlines last year, bearing the word idiberug (perhaps a name). While I was looking for examples, I found the text of an Anglo-Saxon rune poem on Wikipedia, which expands on the notion of ice: "Ice is very cold and immeasurably slippery; it glistens as clear as glass and most like to gems; it is a floor wrought by the frost, fair to look upon." [runes-1]One of the oldest surviving runic inscriptions, image from here. While we are in northern Europe, I also cannot resist sharing this Tweet from Marsh's Library showing what they label as the first example of snowflakes in print, from Olaus Magnus' History of the Northern People, printed in 1555. The shapes of the snowflakes are quite fascinating, especially in comparison with the Chinese and Dongba examples we saw at the beginning of this post. (This was shared with us by @ChadiCongreso on Twitter). [geljsa1xyaanjaq]Image from here. We now head to the Pyrenees for our next glimpse of snow. When beginning work on this blog post, we asked on social media for more examples, which brought in some very interesting responses! This one is from the minoritised language Aragonese - kindly offered by @celtiber.bsky.social on Bluesky. The manuscript from which the snippet below comes contains a 1488 court case about a snowball fight. The word njeue is the word for "snow" and may be recognisable as a cognate of the snow word in many Indo-European languages (on which, more below!). This particular snowball fight unfortunately got a bit violent, as the playing (jugaban a la njeue = modern chugaban a la nieu) got more rough and escalated to a slap over the ear, exchanged blows and finally a dagger (punyal)! [1e9fbabc-d008-4223-ac8d-b4e7bc4a58d4] [f6a70877-a1f8-482a-99dd-cc88ff746b36] Aragonese manuscript, image from here. So there are lots of things you can do with snow! The ancient Greek poet Meleager suggests using it to quench the fires of unwanted love: "Love-sick deceivers of your souls, you who know the flame of lads' love, having tasted the bitter honey, pour about my heart cold water, cold, and quickly, water from new-melted snow. For I have dared to look on Dionysius. But, fellow-slaves, before it reaches my vitals, put out the fire in me." (Greek Anthology 12.81, translation from here.) Only the chill from newly melted snow would do the trick! Thank you to Flavia Amaral for the reference. But what if you live in an area where snow is not common? Do you have a word for it? One interesting nugget often cited in the study of Indo-European languages (especially when chasing the tantalising unknowable geographical origins of the language family spread from central Asia to western Europe) is a Sanskrit word for something "sticky" or "greasy" (also used as a word for "loving" or "friendly"!), snigdha snigdh (from snih- "to stick"). What is so fascinating is that this patently comes from the same Indo-European root that gives the snow words of many other languages of the family, *sneigwh-. The word snow itself comes from this root, as does the Aragonese njeue mentioned above, the Greek verb nipho from the Meleager poem and many many more. This raises a lot of questions about the etymological origins of words and their semantic developments - did early speakers of Sanskrit or a proto-language associate this word with snow, or not? We'll finish with two examples of snow words in warmer climes that touch on similar problems, beginning in Egypt. [abu_simbel_temple_may_30_2007]The Facade of the Temple of Rameses at Abu Simbel, image from here. It is very hard to spot the word "snow" in ancient Egypt. Ironically, to find it, we have to travel south, and embrace the Nubian heat, as we reach Abu Simbel. Here, Rameses II, the very Ozymandias himself, constructed an impressive temple, so his Nubian neighbours could "look on his work and despair". Next to the colossal feet of the king, we will find "snow" in a rather festive occasion: not a holiday but a royal wedding. Rameses II recorded his marriage with the daughter of Hittite king Hattusili III on the wall. The stories goes, after the Battle of Kadesh, in the winter of 1246 to 1245 BCE, the princess Maathorneferure and the tribute bearers travel to Egypt. After they have crossed the Egyptian border in Canaan, Rameses decided to send an army to welcome and escort them to his palace at Nile Delta. Upon a second thought, the pharaoh pondered the difficulties his army might face and asked: "What will be the situation of those people who were sent to Jahi (a place in Palestine) in these days of rain, when it (even) snowed in the Season of the Emergence"? [whatwillbethesituation] The Season of the Emergence is roughly from late December to May next year--but for ancient Egyptians, it was probably strange to see snow even in these months. So strange that the word "srq" was a loan word from Semitic language (e.g. Akkadian salgum, Hebrew sheleg, shaeleg and Arabic thlj thalj). But still, it is a kind of rain. So the Egyptians used the determinative signs to depict strings of rain falling from the sky. Can you spot them (in a different colour)? So the worrying Rameses made an offering to Seth and asked him to be nice for once: "...you shall not create rain, icy wind and snow until the miracles you assign to me have reached me (which means the Hittite tribute and bride)". [youshallnotcreaterain] We can imagine the Hittite princess and her entourage marched through the snowy landscape with Egyptian armies, sealing the peace between the two ancient powers--one that deserves a hearty celebration. And indeed, we still celebrate it today. In 1970, two years after Rameses' Temple of Abu Simbel was cut and reassembled to evade the flood caused by Aswan Dam, the Turkish government gifted a replica of the treaty between Hittite and Egypt (a copper replica of a clay cuneiform tablet) to the United Nations and now it still watches over the north entrance of the Security Council. [unny067g]The replica Hittite-Egyptian peace treaty at the United Nations, image from here. One of our responses on social media shows a closely related word to the borrowed one in Rameses's Egyptian inscription. Isaac Gantwerk Mayer on Bluesky sent an image of the Hebrew word sheleg "snow" in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Great Psalms Scroll, column 11, Psalm 148). Here snow is one of the great forces under god's control: "lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding..." (NIV translation), another testament to the power of the weather in people's lives. [a0bf1b45-c5c8-489b-871a-6fa448ace68b]Detail from B-371124, image from the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library Project. Have you guessed where we are heading for our final example? You might not be thinking of Guatemala! But I was just reading a most interesting article by David Stuart and Stephen Houston that argues for a Mayan reference to snow. The inscription is the intriguing Marcador from Tikal, which records important political events of the 4th and early 5th centuries CE. [marcador]The Tikal Marcador inscription, image from here. One figure mentioned in the inscription, who seems to have links with Teotihuacan (another major Mayan centre located in Mexico), is known as the "Spearthrower Owl". The Spearthrower Owl is associated with a place name represented by a glyph comprising the "hill/mountain" logogram WITS alongside the syllable ma, a sign associated with cotton (thought to be read as nok' or no) and a numeral 5. The cotton sign is the important part and is represented by the little U shapes in the centre of one of the elements in each example. [cotton]Signs drawn by Linda Schele, image from here. Stuart and Houston suggest that what we are seeing here is a depiction of five mountains around the area of Teotihuacan, seen here from the more tropical climate of Tikal to the south, with a somewhat romantic depiction of the snowy mountain peaks as likened to fluffy, white cotton. They even find a visually striking analogy for cotton-covered snowy mountains in the Mixtec Codex Nutall. [codex]Detail from the Codex Nutall, British Museum ADD.MSS 39671, depicted here. So we have followed our snowdrifts from China all the way to Guatemala, with a few stops in between. I'm sure there are many more we could have included from other parts of the world - please send us your ideas! And in the meanwhile we wish you the best of the magical winter season, however it looks for you. ~ by Pippa Steele (VIEWS PI), with long interventions from Tian Tian (VIEWS Visiting Fellow) on Chinese and Egyptian! [img_20241210_131721] [tian-edited] With further thanks to Olgierd Uziemblo, Chris Miller, Nick Dunlavey, @celtiber.bsky.social, @ChadiCongreso, Flavia Amaral and Isaac Gantwerk Mayer for contributing ideas and material. Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Like Loading... Related Tagged Chinese, Egyptian, Inuktitut, Japanese, Mayan, runes [cc58556] Published by viewsproject View all posts by viewsproject One thought on "Snow signs" 1. [f9bd22] sabinehyland says: December 23, 2024 at 11:23 am Wow! This is amazing! Thank you Pippa and crew for this wonderful holiday treat! LikeLike Reply Leave a comment Cancel reply [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] Post navigation Monumental Inscriptions and the Politics of Destruction [views-logo-4-1]UKRI Frontier Research Grant, no. EP/X028240/1 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow The VIEWS project on WordPress.com Type your email... 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