Summery (sic)

The other morning (well last week, probably, given that I have a concert on Saturday) Radio 3 celebrated the summer solstice with lots of appropriate music. One of the pieces chosen though provoked these tweets:

This was an idea I had written about while my choir was meeting over Zoom two years ago and we sang this:

Manuscript from Reading Abbey, but probably produced in Oxford.
(see David Crystal, The Stories of English [2005], p. 108)

At the time I wrote:

But why Sumer? Isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

In this case there was a delay of well over two centuries between the two similar-sounding words (the medieval Reading/Oxford sumer and the mid-sixteenth century [and later] 'summer'). But this clash of similar-sounding words put me in mind of another word that no longer means what it meant when first applied: red  as in 'red kite', 'red squirrel', 'red deer', 'redhead',  'robin redbreast' .... Like 'sumer', 'red' once had a wider meaning than we attach to it now....

<autobiographical_note>
My  middle sister (of three), a redhead, always hated my grandfather's nickname for her: 'Rusty'. In fact it was a source of great friction at the time, and I'm taking a bit of a risk reminding her.  It seemed to me at the time that rusty was a more accurate description of the colour than red.

<wimbledon-related-aside> 

The hawk used at Wimbledon to keep pigeons away is called Rufus. I imagine the 'Ru-', like the 'ru-' of Rusty, refers to the colour (although the hawk in question may not be so coloured – the name when coined would originally have been applied [I guess] to a redhead). 

<background-reading> 

For more on this 'ru-' thing, see this:

... from a PIE root *reudh- "red, ruddy," the only color for which a definite common PIE root word has been found. It also is the root of native ruddy, rust, and, via Latin, ruby, rubric, russet, etc.

 </background-reading> 

</wimbledon-related-aside>

</autobiographical_note>

...

And the gap between the two usages of 'red' was much less than the two or three hundred years that separated 'sumer' and 'summer'. Etymonline dates 'red' to the mid-thirteenth century, and (of course) compounds came later....

<example>

 

</example> 

So the European robin was dubbed 'redbreast', although his breast was not particularly red:

Erithacus rubecula

there was no word for the colour of its breast in English at the time, until the recently imported orange provided (in the early 16th century, says Etymonline) a colour word that meant  

"a reddish-yellow color like that of a ripe orange."

 

 So there was an explanation for the mischromaticization (don't bother looking that up ; it's hot off the presses) of the European  Robin. There's no such explanation for that of the American Robin, a totally different bird, named at a time when the word 'orange' had long been available:

Turdus migratorius
(a rather blue-collar fellow, 
it seems to me)

 

But American English is full of mystery for me. For example, the 'sycamore tree' in the song isn't a sycamore (acer pseudoplatanus); it's an American Plane (platanus occidentalis)...

Anyway, I'm missing the tennis. So that's it for today.

b