A change in the weather?

It has been a scintillating day, from dawn to dusk, and the sun's apricot glow still lingers in a clear sky over to the west. But people in town today were nodding sagely over the deluge forecast for tomorrow. It was very hard to believe that prediction when I walked out to the coast this afternoon. The sea was intensely blue and the sky not much less so: ultramarine head to head with cerulean.

But turning south, away from the sea and inland towards my own house (which lies hidden about two thirds of the way to the right, below the newly-mown fields), I could see these puffs of white vapour lined up like outriders advancing before the main army of whatever is to come. Even this usually damp Western seaboard could do with rain: streams are running low and normally boggy areas have dried hard.

The words for blue set me pondering on another linguistic comparison between English and Welsh. In English there are many words for blue (sapphire, azure, cobalt, indigo, as well as the ones already mentioned). In Welsh there is but one: glas. It is also, traditionally, the word for green. Although there is a modern-day term for green, gwyrdd, Welsh was originally one of the so-called 'grue' languages that make no distinction within the blue-green part of the spectrum.

Yesterday I remarked I had never seen a weather vane with the points of the compass marked for the Welsh not the English words and wondered if it was because they do not all have different initial letters as they do in English. Someone has informed me that it's the same with Polish: North and South both start with the letter P so two-letter abbreviations are used. And I am delighted to discover that a Welsh language weather vane does exist! It can be seen here.