21.04.24: the weather in 1750 [2]

The document in the previous post is a series of simple weather descriptions for one month. The author wrote it in Latin not as some pointless “exercise” to show how well he knew the language. He wrote it in Latin as an active means of communication which would be universally understood by his academic peers throughout Europe. You won’t find a Classical Latin text with such an intensity of weather expressions one after the other – or you will have to wade through the writings of Lucretius - but you will in this text.

Texts from this period are interesting because they show a “rebirth” of interest in, among others, science and geography. Sometimes these texts have no translation (I cannot recall whether this one did) and sometimes they appear in no other format except the original.

So, this is an original Latin text in its original format. I have copied it exactly the way it was written and I’ll make a few comments about certain aspects of the format. Earlier writing which used calligraphy can be quite dense but this 18th century piece is quite accessible.

A couple of notes:

[1] (May 8th) serenitas. FB cannot reproduce the letter, but the one that looks like an /f/ with a small stroke to the left is a form of /s/.

[2] Some texts use /j/ instead of /i/: MAJUS = MAIUS; most books nowadays (and these posts) use /i/. [image #1]

[3] diacritics: these are marks placed above or below letters (sometimes beside letters) to indicate, for example, how a letter is pronounced; if you have studied French then you will already be familiar with ‘accents’ e.g. é, ç, or, if you know German then you will recognise the umlaut accent ü. Latin does not use diacritics; the macron that you see in the posts and in textbooks is only used to indicate long vowels [ā, ē, ī, ō, ū] but diacritical marks were used from the Middle Ages by the scribes copying Latin manuscripts and are also evident in this text.

nubilũ Letter /u/ with tilde [ ͂ ], the same diacritic used in Spanish (but for a different reason), represents a following /m/ or /n/

nubilum: cloud; mist

[4] Endings are sometimes missing from the texts; this one is marked by a full stop to indicate that:

impetuos. ventos = impetuosos ventos

[5]

(i) procellosumq: this is an abbreviation of the enclitic que (and)

(ii) &, an ampersand, the sign to mark ‘and’

We are only focussing on the weather expressions, but there are some other points of interest which use vocabulary that has already been discussed in previous posts [image #2]

Curs: abbreviation for cursus, -ūs [4/m] here referring to the ‘courses’ of the Moon i.e. the revolutions of the Moon around the Earth.

Or: abbreviation for ortus, -ūs [4/m] referring to the hour (hōra) and minute (minūta) the sun rises; note the appearance of the word for minute; minutes were not used in the expression of clock time in Ancient Rome. This is an example of a word that did exist in Classical Latin which has been adapted.

Oc: abbreviation for occasus, -ūs [4/m] referring to the hour (h) and minute (m) the sun sets.