THREE TIMES NINE
March, spring, springtime
Linguistics
| 27-03-2021
It is March, and spring has just begun. In Dutch there are two words for this season: lente and voorjaar. This makes Dutch an exception. In English, Frisian and German I also managed to find a second word for this season, but springtime of course isn't a very different word from spring, and foarjier and Frühjahr are less common synonyms in Frisian and German than voorjaar is in Dutch. Another fun fact: Dutch lente is clearly the ancestor of the same Afrikaans word, while Dutch or Low German voorjaar led to Danish forår. And I suspect that vår and vor are shortened versions of that. But you can look that up yourself ;)
THREE TIMES NINE
Originally there were three Germanic language families: North, East and West Germanic. Unfortunately, all East Germanic languages have died out, but fortunately North and West Germanic languages are still there. In the section THREE TIMES NINE, every month on the 27th, I put three words in nine of those languages next to each other. In contrast to the series WEST GERMANIC, in this case, I leave the comparison to you. Have fun comparing!
Sources
All translations: Google Translate.
Images: own edits with photo from own archive.