Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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In the tropics there is often only one rainy and one dry season, with two divisions of the year corresponding to these. On the Orinoco there are summer and winter, i. e. the dry and the rainy seasons. In Maipuri the dry season is called camoti, ‘the glowing splendour of the sun’, and the rainy season canepó. Among the Tamanacho winter is called canepó, ‘rain’, ‘rainy season’, summer is vannu, ‘crickets’, since these insects chirp incessantly to the end of the season[237]. The Tupi have expressions for dry and rainy seasons but not for the year as a whole. The Bakairi reckon by the semesters of the dry and the rainy seasons[238]. The Karaya of Central Brazil reckon the year from one fall of the river to another. They thereby distinguish two seasons, the dry season when they live on the sand-banks, and the rainy season when they live on the upper banks of the river[239]. The Wagogo of E. Africa divide the year into two halves: kibahu, the dry season, about May-October, and kifugu, the rainy season, November to April[240]. So also the Nandi: iwotet, rainy season, March-August, and kement, dry season, September-February[241]; further the tribes of Loango[242], the Bantu tribes of the Congo State[243], and the Cross River negroes of the Cameroons[244]. The Tshi-speaking peoples divide the year into two periods: the smaller hohbor, from May to August, and the larger from September to April[245]. Among the Akamba the year consists of two rainy seasons separated by two dry periods: ambua anzwa, ambua ua[246]. Where this natural division prevails, however, the half-year is often put in the place of the year[247].