It's fall. Or is it autumn? Why do we have two names for this season anyway?

I tried to find out, but I'm still unclear. It seems to be one of those "evolving language" things. This is why English is such a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn. It keeps changing while you're speaking it.

Important Note: I had all kinds of links and notes and stuff for this entry, but then I lost them in the depths of my pocketbook. Trust me, you don't want to go there. So I'm going from my memory......

The thing that interested me was that until sometime in the 1600's in England the season was called "Harvest" which kind of makes sense. The word "autumn" was around from about the 1300's and it comes from an Old French word and slowly it began to over take the word "Harvest". I think I can actually understand that, because when the Norman French brought a lot of words with them when they came over and people adopted them to try to sound more like the ruling classes.

But at the same time people also called the season "Fall of the Leaf"...that was sometime in the 1500's or so. That saying came over to the New World and got shortened to "Fall". According to the online dictionary I was reading, "fall" is only in use in the English in the US. "Fall" comes from the Old English word "Faellen".

The word "autumn" before it was part of a word in Old French seems to have come from the Etruscan language.

So, who were those guys, the Etruscans anyway? They seem to have contributed a lot to modern English. It turns out that were the people who lived around the Tuscany region in Italy.....from about 9 BC to 1 BC and eventually they kind of just melded with the Romans who were running around expanding their empire. They apparently never became as famous AS the romans because they lacked the cool helmets with the broomstick/mohawk look.

Well. Maybe there were other reasons.

Anway, there you have the story on autumn and fall. The condensed version. Really condensed.