Re: quo meridies ivit?

In a message dated 7/18/2000 1:04:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
yl-ruil@2CRFM.NET writes:

<< Just a question about the fate of the Latin words for south, east, north
and
 west (meridies, oriens, septentriones, occidens). Where did they go? The
 modern romance names are:

 French: sud, est, nord, ouest
 Italian: sud, est, nord, ovest
 Spanish: sur, este, norte, oeste
 Portuguese: sul, este, norte, oeste
 Romanian: sud, est (or rasarit- the a's have breves), nord, vest

 All borrowed from Germanic (in fact, according to my Dictionary of French
 Etymology, the terms are borrowed from English) sources. But how, why and
 when? And why did all the Romance languages adopt them? >>

    Well, I can not speak for all the romance languages, but the words
"occidental", "oriental", "meridional", and maybe even "septentrional"
(though I am not sure about that one), are used in Spanish, but for regions
of the world, not compass directions. They use it more in the sense of, for
example, "el mundo oriental" and "el mundo occidental", to speak of Asia and
Europe, respectively. They use "meridional" in a longitude-lattitude sense,
like as we say in English, for example, the Prime Meridian.
    As to why they were adopted, and, oddly enough, by nearly all the romance
languages (at least the ones listed above), I don't know. Its an interesting
question, and one that I will definitely bring up before my Spanish teacher,
who is a language scholar of sorts, when school is back in session.

~Cathy~