Paper on "Meteorological Knowledge in Folk Proverbs"

Language is the oral summary of working people after observing nature, society and life. It widely reflects the wisdom of the masses and shows their imagination. The thoughts, knowledge, experiences and feelings contained in proverbs have long-term and great reference significance for others and future generations.

Meteorological proverbs or weather proverbs are valuable experiences accumulated by people in harmony with nature for thousands of years. In the practice of production and life, the masses carefully observe the wind, clouds, thunder and lightning, rain, fog, ice, frost, sun, moon, stars and snow, constantly think about their activities, describe their ever-changing with concise language and accurate and vivid images, and predict their ins and outs.

My grandfather is an amateur weather observer who is good at observing the sky and the earth. He has accumulated a bellyful of weather proverbs. For the first time, I heard my grandfather talk about "the chickens don't return to the magpies when the swallows fly low in the corridor", "The morning sun doesn't go out, the sunset travels thousands of miles", "Yan Lei cries, the rain is coming" and "I will return to my master if it doesn't rain in Grain Rain".

Li, the stationmaster of the county weather station, speaks with a foreign accent, tall and thin. Every afternoon at four or five o'clock, he came to see my grandfather excitedly as usual. My grandfather slowly looked up at the sky, looked at the large fields in front of the village, and then published his observations and predictions on the weather in detail. Li Shifu took notes carefully with a notebook. When I listened to the weather forecast on the radio, I thought, there must be my grandfather's contribution. I'm proud of it.

At that time, I was in the first grade, and I was only thirteen or fourteen years old. One day I came home from school early and met menstruation. menstruation told me sadly, "Ping, your grandfather passed away." I was shocked and appalled. Although I knew my grandfather was ill, he still sat in the kitchen and had dinner last night, as if nothing had happened. I didn't expect to leave us forever this morning!

The county meteorological observatory sent a wreath. A memorial service was held in the afternoon, and stationmaster Li personally attended and bowed to his old man's house three times.

Thirty-two years later, I often recall my grandfather's voice and smile, and always freeze in his posture of looking up at the sky. I vaguely remember that he once left a weather proverb, which was written by stationmaster Li and sent to him. Because it has moved several times, it is difficult to find its beauty in thousands of books. One day in 2005 1 month, like looking for a needle in a haystack, I found it!

This is a pure collection of weather proverbs. In the preface, the author said that in the past few years, he "traveled all over Li Anping and peace county and found that the wisdom of the masses is infinite". He turned the piecemeal experience of the masses into something more systematic. "I hope to find out the indicators through some efforts." The signature is 1968 on August 3rd. This book is 32 pages small, mimeographed, ***34 pages, about 22,700 words. The book is divided into more than ten parts, such as clouds, fog, wind, rain, thunder, electricity, chardonnay, hail, snow, frost, dew, rainbow, sun, moon and stars, and each part lists the meteorological proverbs he collected and explains them in categories.

There are some proverbs about clouds, such as "I'm afraid of clouds rising in the south in the morning and clouds piling up in the north at night", "Clouds rise in the morning, and the wind and rain suddenly come", "Clouds fall in the morning, and it's sunny after dinner", "The east is white at sunrise, and the rain stops" and so on. The author explained that the gray-black clouds surging in the southeast in the morning or the convective clouds appearing in the morning are all bad weather. If the clouds in the southeast are lifted or split, the sky is white and transparent, the sky is open and foggy, which are all signs of fine weather.

There are many proverbs about wind, which are divided into east wind, west wind, south wind and north wind. According to the author's analysis, peace county Mountain is high and deep, and the wind direction is often dominated by mountains. Different places are behind the mountain, so under the same weather conditions, the wind direction in different places will be different. The wind comes from the valley, so it tends to be southeast in summer and north in winter. The southeast wind is weak and banded; The north wind is dry and cold and fierce. For example, he said, "The south wind is afraid of flooding, and the north wind is afraid of heat." A few drops from the south wind will kill you; When the north wind is clear and cloudless and the light is strong, the temperature rises quickly and the intensity will weaken. It is "sunny and sunny."

Proverbs about rain are: "The drizzle is not long, the heavy rain is not long", "When it gets dark, it will still rain, and the heavy rain will see you tomorrow", "When it gets dark, the flood is wide", "The flood is thunderless and the house collapses" and so on. Taking 1964 peace flood as an example, it shows that it is difficult for the weather to get better from mid-March to summer solstice. Soft rain will brew a flood if it rains for a long time. The day before the heavy rain, it kept raining from morning till night, and the sky became heavier and heavier, and then it rained cats and dogs all night. Continuous precipitation finally flooded.

The authors of some proverbs pointed out the specific place where it came into being. For example, "the dark clouds pass the hillock, and when the wind is strong, it will hail", and "hillock" refers to the snow-capped mountains in the north of Heping, with an altitude of 846 meters. Another example is the "black dragon over the hill", where "dragon" refers to cumulus clouds and "hill" refers to Yangmeizhang in the north of the pear garden, with an altitude of 825 meters. Another example is "digging a dragon rainbow (in a short period of time), no more than three days of wind and rain", and the broken rainbow on the dam belongs to dry rainbow. Another example is "a fog, snow in three dynasties", and the author indicates that it comes from Changtang Town.

Now I don't know which proverbs listed in this collection of peaceful weather proverbs were provided by my grandfather. But I can be sure that my grandfather, who was born as a farmer, selflessly devoted his perceptual experience in exploring the laws of weather changes to the cause of peaceful weather and made beneficial contributions to peaceful weather forecasting and agricultural production.

Later, my interest in meteorology and even astronomy and geography may be related to my childhood and adolescence. I have bought popular science books such as astronomical knowledge to read, browsed books such as predictable weather, and dabbled in meteorological knowledge and phenology in the book 100,000 Why. Be sure to watch CCTV's Today's Weather program recently. Although it is only five minutes, it is as refreshing as drinking a shower. The five-minute program, which combines meteorological, literary and historical knowledge, made me linger for a long time.

Speaking of weather proverbs, we can't help thinking of Zhu Kezhen. He is a famous meteorologist in China. He kept a meteorological diary for decades, and finally founded phenology, which made outstanding contributions to the development of meteorological science in China. Through phenology, we have a scientific understanding of the proverbs of things, sky, thunder, fog and dew. For example, "the loach jumps, and the wind and rain arrive", we both know why and why. It turns out that loach lurks in the mud at the bottom of the water on a sunny day, breathing a little oxygen in the water and surviving. If the weather is abnormal, the air pressure becomes lower, the temperature rises, and the oxygen in the water decreases, the loach has to surface to absorb oxygen; It is motionless, fidgety and even jumps out of the water, which indicates that it will rain soon. Another example is "the sun in the East Rainbow and the rain in the West Rainbow". Rainbow is formed after sunlight is refracted and reflected by raindrops. The rainbow is in the west, indicating that there are a lot of raindrops in the atmosphere in the west. They move from west to east with the movement of the weather system, and it will rain locally in the future. The rainbow is in the east, indicating that there are a lot of raindrops in the atmosphere in the east, but the raindrops in the east have moved eastward with the weather system, and it will not rain locally in the future. Others, such as "the sun is dizzy in the middle of the night and the moon is dizzy in the wind at noon", "the carp point in the sky, the sun and the valley turn differently in the morning" and "it's sunny and foggy, and it's cloudy and foggy", all imply scientific principles.

It is understood that Xiang Colleen Chan in the Tang Dynasty is the earliest collection of meteorological songs and proverbs in China, with a total of meteorological proverbs 169. Today, meteorological proverbs are as numerous as the sand in the river and the stars in the sky. Meteorological proverbs are colloquial, rhyming and catchy, and often use dialect words.