Chinese 夏 ‘summer’: time of leisure ?

Baxter-Sagart 2014 reconstruct 夏 *[g]ˤraʔ > haeH > xià ‘summer’ (~ *[g]ˤraʔ-s). A homophone is 暇 *[g]ˤra-s > haeH > xià ‘leisure’, with a probable cognate in Written Burmese:  â ‘vacant, free; disengaged’. In the two or three months it takes the millets to grow, set ears and ripen, between early summer and harvesting in late summer or autumn, a period of (relative) calm sets in. It would make sense if that period was called ‘leisure’: that would later become the name of summer.

Cite this post as: Laurent Sagart, "Chinese 夏 ‘summer’: time of leisure ?," in Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian, 11/02/2023, https://stan.hypotheses.org/2246.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search