September usually marks the start of a new season - but what you call that season depends on where you are and whom you ask.
In the UK, people will tell you it's "autumn". However, cross the Atlantic and you'll find that people use both "fall" and "autumn" when talking about this time of year. In the English language, the season has two widely accepted names. Why does it have to be so confusing (令人困惑的)?
According to Dictionary. com, "fall" isn't a modern word that followed the more traditional "autumn". The two terms were actually first recorded within a few hundred years of each other.
Before either word appeared in the dictionary, the seasons separating the cold and warm months didn't have common names. The main thing people did during the pre-winter period was gathering crops, so it was called "harvest" in Old English.
Then, in the 1600s, more and more people left rural farms and moved into cities. Without farming, the term "harvest" became less useful to people in cities. Some English speakers needed a different name for the season. They knew leaves fell from trees during that season, so people called the season "the fall of the leaf", or "fall" for short. But by the end of the 1600s, "autumn", from the French word "autompne" and the Latin "autumnus", was introduced in England and replaced "fall" as the standard term for the harvesting season.
At the same time, British people were making their first trips to North America. They brought the words "fall" and "autumn" with them. Today, using both words to describe the season is a very American thing.
微信扫码预览、分享更方便
