When people don't know the true scientific cause of something, they will confidently invent a beautiful, imaginative tale. In ancient times, humans did not know the scientific reasons behind the creation of the sun, the moon and the earth, so they used their imagination to spin many stories. They did not know what caused disease, so many countries around the world, India excepted, supposed that spirits and ghosts were to blame. (In India, disease was understood to arise from an imbalance of vāta, kapha and pitta.) People did not know why earthquakes happen, so in countries like Japan it was believed that a giant catfish, Namazu, caused them. In India there is the mythological picture of the earth held up by the boundless tortoise, the eight elephants and the serpent Śeṣa, and people believed that earthquakes occurred when these creatures stirred. In China, earthquakes were imagined to result from an imbalance of yin and yang. The ancient Greeks held that Poseidon, god of the sea, was the cause. Whenever early humans lacked the real scientific explanation, they put their imagination to work and guessed an answer themselves.
Even today, people often do the same. Examples can be found in the world of words too. An unschooled man once declared that because the lamp (ḍibiri) is held in the left hand, the left hand came to be called ḍebhiri. But that is only a guess, since many Indian languages have related words. Prakrit had the word ḍavva, and from it various words meaning "left" arose in other Aryan languages, though the word is originally Dravidian in origin.
Recently, in the same spirit, some gentleman wrote with perfect seriousness that the seasons in Europe depend on the sea, and that the people of ancient England, marvelling at this wonder of the ocean, joined the words "Sea" and "Son" to coin "Season", so that a season is, in effect, a child of the sea. Hearing this remarkable discovery, one imagines the Anglo-Saxons of old abandoning their work to sit on the shore playing with letters, and every time a new season arrived, pointing at the sea and dancing for joy. If we accept this logic, then tomorrow morning someone could just as well claim that "Mushroom" comes from "Mush" (mud) and "Room" (a house or nest), because a mushroom stands in the mud like a little house. Or that "Kidney" was born from the sight of a Kid, a small child, crawling on its Knee. Such misguided imagination may be admirable in its way, but in linguistics and history it serves only as a source of amusement. It is certainly pleasant to hear the story of the sea and its son, but it has not the remotest connection with reality. The history of a language is not the word games of some idle sailor. It is the long, living story of the evolution of human civilization, of agriculture, war, linguistic mixing and social change. The word "season" was not born in the blue waters of the sea. It was born in the farmer's hands, in the smell of the soil, in the act of sowing seed. To understand the true journey of this word, we must travel back thousands of years through the stream of time, to the earliest stages of human civilization.
At that time there was no modern state called England or Europe, and no English language. The story begins thousands of years ago with an ancient root that linguists identify as *seh₁-. The primary meaning of this root was "to sow seed" or "to plant in the soil." When humans, with the discovery of agriculture, left behind wild life and hunting and became bound to the land, the most important task was to sow seed in the soil at the right time. Their food and their very lives depended on the seed sprouting and the harvest being gathered. So the act of "sowing" or "planting" took a foundational place in human culture and consciousness.
In India, from this same root *seh₁, there came *sáHyakas, and later sāyaka, which means "an arrow that pierces its target."
But elsewhere, with the growth of Roman civilization, the root *seh₁- changed in Latin into the verb serō, meaning "to sow seed." The past participle of this verb was satum. From satum emerged a noun, satiō. In Latin, satiō meant "the act of sowing seed" or "planting time." For Roman farmers, not every part of the year was alike. The particular time when soil and weather were most suitable for sowing, they came to call satiō. One point should be clear here: up to this stage the word did not yet refer to all the seasons of the year. It denoted only that most crucial period of farming, the beginning of the crop cycle.
Gradually the Roman Empire expanded enormously. On the lips of Roman soldiers, merchants, rulers and farmers, Latin spread across all of Western Europe. In time the Empire fell, but Latin took regional forms in different lands and gave birth to new languages, which we now call the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. With geographical distance, shifts in pronunciation and local influences, the Latin word satiō passed through the Gallo-Roman world into Old French. There it changed into seson or saison. In old France, saison meant "the time of sowing seed" or "the particular season for farm work." By then human society had come to understand that the year is divided into certain natural cycles, and that the time of sowing is the first and foremost phase of that whole cycle.
Meanwhile, what was happening in the British Isles?
The Anglo-Saxons of England knew nothing of the word "season" at that time. The language they spoke, which we call Old English, was a Germanic tongue. For expressing seasons or periods of time, Old English had its own entirely different vocabulary. They used sǣl, meaning time, a fitting opportunity, or a season. It survived into Middle English as sele. Another native word was tīd, meaning time, a span of time, or a season. The "tide" we see in modern English words like eventide, springtide and Christmastide did not originally come from the ebb and flow of the sea. It came from this ancient tīd (time or season), which was later also applied to the sea's rise and fall because it came at regular intervals. In addition, that original Proto-Indo-European root *seh₁- had already taken its own form in Old English through the Germanic branch. These forms were sāwan (to sow) and sǣd (seed). In other words, the modern English word "seed" and the word "season," which came from Latin through French, are really cognates, two different branches born of a single root.
So how did this French saison come to England and spread its dominion by pushing out English's own words? The answer lies in a pivotal moment of 1066, known as the Norman Conquest. When William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy in France, invaded England and defeated the Saxon king at the Battle of Hastings, the social, political and linguistic fabric of England changed completely. The victorious Norman rulers established Anglo-Norman French as the language of the royal court, administration, law and the nobility.
As a result, while ordinary Anglo-Saxons at the lower levels continued to speak Old English, the rulers and upper classes spoke French. After the two languages lived side by side for more than two centuries, their blending produced Middle English. In the course of this linguistic mixing, thousands of French words entered the English vocabulary. One such word was Old French seson or saison, which Middle English adopted as sesoun or seson.
Once it became part of English social life, the word widened its meaning still further. What had first been only "the time of sowing seed" or "the particular period of farming" gradually came to be used for any natural season of the year: summer, monsoon, autumn, winter. For in an agricultural society every season had its own farming duty: sowing the seed, tending the crop, harvesting, and letting the land rest for the following year. And so the word sesoun grew beyond its original meaning of sowing and came to encompass all the natural divisions of the year.
In the process, English's own ancient Germanic words slowly receded. Middle English sele (from Old English sǣl) eventually fell out of use and disappeared altogether. The word tide lost its broad sense of season or time in general and remained confined to the rise and fall of the sea or the timing of certain traditional festivals. The French newcomer sesoun displaced these old words, and later, as spelling changed, it settled permanently into modern English as "season."
This was the true historical journey of the word "season", a story our imaginative friend never learned, content as he was to weave a tale of "Sea" and "Son" from the spelling alone !
If the origin of words were as easy as human imagination, then perhaps every linguist in the world would sit by the seashore writing poetry, and all the farmers of the past would have left their seed unsown, simply waiting to receive the children of the sea. To turn a living word, born of nature's laws, the smell of the soil and the labour of civilization, into a tale spun from water is surely a fascinating specimen of human ignorance and imagination alike.
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