Professional paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/jezik.2024.71.22
(Un)favorable Weather Conditions Can the Snow Shower in the Croatian Idiom?
Tihomir Živić
orcid.org/0000-0002-6688-6882
Abstract
The paper examines the syntagm pljusak snijega (i.e., “snow shower”), a phrase that
has been frequently found in weather forecasts by the Croatian media since the 1970s and
that has been expanded by the Internet since the 1990s. Illustrating with examples that
the English language has the synonymous bigram snow shower and confirming that the
Croatian syntagm is indeed its translation, it has been warned that the Croatian dictionaries
do not record a connection between the concepts of pljusak (i.e., “shower”) and snijeg
(i.e., “snow”), whereby pljusak is connected only with rain or, figuratively, with an abrupt
outburst, so a number of more suitable substitutes for the description of appearance and
intensity of snowfall are listed. Thus, it is concluded that a centennial thesaurus of the Croatian
language—especially that of the literary language—offers an almost equal number of
types for snijeg as some other languages, which take the terminology of that concept very
seriously, such as the Inuit and its dialects.
Keywords
weather forecasts; Croatian language; English language; snow shower; substitutes
Hrčak ID:
330095
URI
Publication date:
1.10.2024.
Visits: 503 *