Snow

Occasionally scraps of great poems pop into my head, seemingly at random: "Lhude sing cuccu," for instance, or "Whan that Aprille with his shores soote/The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote," or, lately, "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?"

Nothing wonderful about that, except for how much I enjoy the rags and tatters left to me. These are some of the most famous lines in English and French literature.

And when I investigated the Villon line, "Mais où sont . . . ," I discovered that I would have heard it most recently when the dowager countess quotes this line to Mary, in French, during Downton Abbey's 2015 Christmas Special and series finale. She is consoling Mary about her lost love, and remembering a great lost love from her own past.

"Hmm," I thought, our word "snows" doesn't seem to have much in common with "neiges" or other Romance language words for snows, "nevi" (Italian), "nieve" (Spanish), "neves" (Portuguese). So, I wondered, are the words "snows" and "neiges" related or not?

Happens they are, and the link is hinted at in the German word for snow, "schnee."

According to the Wikipedia entry for snow, the word is from "Middle English snow, snaw, from Old English snāw (“snow”)" and is "cognate with Scots shaw ('snow'), West Frisian sine ('snow'), Dutch sneeuw ('snow')," and so on.

What can I say? Sometimes we word nerds just get to go all out.