Roots of Summer
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Hi. I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Remember when Juliet asked Romeo, "What's in a name?" If that name happens to be "summer" then apparently a lot. Correspondent Zhenya Gallon of Boulder, Colorado, shares more.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that we're standing on the curved surface of a revolving, orbiting planet. But maybe your perspective, like mine, is just tilted enough to remember that it's the tilt of earth's axis that brings us the seasons.

Because of that tilt, right now the Northern Hemisphere is leaning in toward the sun. On June 21st, the sun is at its northernmost point in the sky, marking the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. As the land and oceans warm, the sun's summer heat gets me thinking about lemonade and a dip in the lake.

I don't know what the Indo-Europeans did to beat the summer heat. But I do know they talked about it eight thousand years ago.

No one has heard the language they spoke as they worked their fields, somewhere in the middle of eastern Europe. Linguistic scholars reconstructed Indo-European by noticing that many languages of Europe, the Middle East, and India share common sounds for words with related meanings. They've rebuilt some 2,000 word roots in Indo-European that way.

We know everyone was hot because the roots, *sem- or *sam-, show up pretty much unchanged in everything from Sanskrit to Old Norse.

Speakers of Old Iranian said sam and the Old Celts said *samo- while fanning their brows.

You can hear the old Germanic sounds of summer in the modern Danish Sommer and Dutch zomer. And Old English sumar has hardly changed at all.

So when I hear talk about "the good old summer time," I think about how long we've been searching for ways to beat the heat - and talking about it! Then I think about jumping in that lake.

That's Zhenya Gallon of Boulder, Colorado.