Is there a single origin for the connection between time and weather?

Question

There are several families of languages where the same word can mean either a concept closely related to time or a concept closely related to weather:

• Romance root: French temps, Italian tempo, Spanish tiempo, …
• Slavic root: Bulgarian време, Croatian vrijeme, Romanian vreme, …
• Celtic root: Gaelic aimsir, Breton amzer, …
• Greek: καιρός
• Hungarian (Turkic root): idő
• Albanian koha

These are five (or six) sets of languages with no obvious etymological connection for this word. They do, however, have geographical connections, so with only this data I can't exclude cross-language contamination from some proto-Indo-European root.

Is there a known single origin for the connection between weather and time? Or is there a pattern that is known to have appeared independently in several language families (perhaps linking the passage of time with the succession of seasons which are marked by different weather)?

_{This question was prompted by this question on French Language & Usage.}

Answer 1

A known single origin for all is certainly impossible since many languages don't have the same cognate term. So what I guess you are really looking for is a single plausible justification for semantic similarity between the concepts that might lead to using a single cognate term (within a language) for the same concept.

The canonical example, the Romance languages, where the terms for the two concepts are identical, all stem from both "time" and "weather" deriving from "tempestus" = "season, weather" (EN) derived directly from "tempus" for "time" (EN).

The other examples in IE, Slavic and Celtic, sometimes have one cognate form ("vrijeme" (CR)) sometimes two, "pogoda" "czas" (PL).

The only other language (not already mentioned) I could find (using Google translate) where the two concepts have a common word is Vietnamese:

• time: thời gian
• weather: thời tiết

where all the individual words seem to be about time.

This is just examples. All we can really do is is make an educated but still speculative explanation about the semantic drift that since there does exist at least one example where the distinct concepts have similar roots (Latin), that a word form for "time" has affinities with marked time periods with special weather a "season", and that can drift over to "weather" itself. That one example is enough to justify that they are related.

The existence of the example in Vietnamese just makes it more likely that it is not such a crazy explanation, because, as you you suggest, it comes from a supposedly uninfluenced language area (supposing that even those a Celtic "ams" for both time and weather was not an independent creation but a loan "analogy", even though the root is independent).

One might suggest that Vietnamese might have its pair of terms influenced analogy wise by French but that would take a more in-depth historical/etymological analysis of Vietnamese.

Answer 2

There may not be a single origin; who knows. But the Greek word used is marked, and that does suggest a more explicit connotative meaning than what @Mitch described in his answer. Here's how I've described it elsewhere:

http://hellenisteukontos.opoudjis.net/gtage-the-tsipras-edition-part-2/

Students of Ancient Greek, and particularly students of Koine, pay a lot of attention to the distinction between χρόνος and καιρός, since Ancient Greek uses both, and English usually just uses time for both. The distinction the pair makes is between time in general, and the time for something, the right time to do something. English has ways of expressing the latter that don’t involve the word time, though it’s not as consistent about it as Greek: opportunity, for example, or occasion. Or in archaic English, season.

The distinction persists in Modern Greek, although χρόνος is now learnèd, and fixed expressions tend instead to use ώρα “hour” as a mass noun. So there is a subtle distinction made in the two ways of saying “I don’t have time to see you:

δεν έχω ώρα να σε δω “I don’t have hour to see you = I don’t have enough free time to see you”

δεν έχω καιρό να σε δω “I don’t have occasion to see you = There isn’t a right time for me to see you”

Similarly,

έχεις ώρα για καφέ; “Do you have any free time for a coffee?”

έχεις καιρό για καφέ; “Is any time good for you to have a coffee?”

In a traditional agrarian society, the right time to do something will immediately bring to mind the right time to do agrarian work. Hence season in English turns from the proper occasion for something (To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven), to the season of the year: spring is the season for sowing, autumn is the season for harvesting.

Greek underwent a similar transition, but at a more granular level: it permitted the right time for agrarian work to vary day by day. καιρός thus acquired the meaning “weather”: a sunny day is the occasion/season for working outdoors, a rainy day is the occasion/season not to.

Answer 3

In a discussion with a literary group I attended, someone pointed out that similar "early" instruments such as sundials, were used to measure both time and temperature. So apparently, there was a "common cause," but not an obvious one. And it seems that a number of languages have overlaps between the words for time and temperature.