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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The above-mentioned names of the five seasons are those of the Algonquins of Virginia[278]; the Occaneechi of the same district call them:—the budding or blossoming, the ripening, midsummer, harvest or fall, winter[279]. Certain agricultural tribes of the east divided autumn into early autumn, when the leaves change colour, and late autumn, when they fall, but denoted the two periods by entirely different names[280]. Agriculture is responsible for the adding of a fifth season to the four arising from the warm and the cold periods and the times of transition between these[281]. But other transitional periods between the longer seasons also arise independently[282]. The Lapps have names for the four ordinary seasons, but their language also contains compounds like ‘spring-winter’, i. e. late winter,—a compound also known in Swedish (vår-vinter)—and ‘autumn-summer’, i. e. late summer[283]. The Lapps of Västerbotten divide the year into sjeunjestie, the dark period, and tjuoikestie, the bright period. They also have four seasons:—dalvie, winter, from the freezing of the lakes till the melting of snow; geira, spring, time of snow-melting and spring floods; gese, summer, from the time when the earth becomes visible to the fading of the grass; tjatj, autumn, from this time until the lakes begin to freeze again. The Lapps speak also of talve-qvoutel, mid-winter, kese-qvoutel, midsummer, and tjaktje-kese, late summer[284].