Names of Compass Points
In some languages, points of the compass bear names etymologically derived from words for sunrise and sunset. The English words "orient" and "occident", meaning "east" and "west", respectively, are descended from Latin words meaning "sunrise" and "sunset". The word "levant", related e.g. to French "(se) lever" meaning "lift" or "rise" (and also to English "elevate"), is also used to describe the east. In Polish, the word for east wschód (vskhud), is derived from the morpheme "ws" - meaning "up", and "chód" - signifying "move" (from the verb chodzić - meaning "walk, move"), due to the act of the sun coming up from behind the horizon. The Polish word for west, zachód (zakhud), is similar but with the word "za" at the start, meaning "behind", from the act of the sun going behind the horizon. In Russian, the word for west, запад (zapad), is derived from the words за - meaning "behind", and пад - signifying "fall" (from the verb падать - padat'), due to the act of the sun falling behind the horizon.
Read more about this topic: Sunset
Famous quotes containing the words names of, names, compass and/or points:
“The world is never the same as it was.... And that’s as it should be. Every generation has the obligation to make the preceding generation irrelevant. It happens in little ways: no longer knowing the names of bands or even recognizing their sounds of music; no longer implicitly understanding life’s rules: wearing plaid Bermuda shorts to the grocery and not giving it another thought.”
—Jim Shahin (20th century)
“I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
“Constancy in love is a perpetual inconstancy which fixes our hearts successively to all the qualities of the person loved—sometimes admiring one and sometimes another above all the rest—so that this constancy roves as far as it can, and is no better than inconstancy, confined within the compass of one person.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the “Naught is more real ...” and the “Ubi nihil vales ...” both already in Murphy and neither very rational.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)