The Borient and the Australient?
Sure or boreal and austral if you don’t mind them being adjectives. It’s obsolete now but septentrion meant north and other languages have used meridian or a flavor thereof to mean south but English practically never has.
Right. Septentrion was used to refer to boreal regions in English and in French but is now obsolete. Meridien has been used in French.
In modern usage, you would just refer to the boreal and austral regions.
Not me. I’m sticking with “Antipodean” until I die!
In Spanish, ‘oriente’ and ‘poniente’ are used to designate east and west in street addresses. In about 1870, “este” and “oeste” began to dominate over “oriente” and “poniemte” for Spanish general usage, except for its retention for addresses. Poniente’s etymology derives from the verb ‘poner’ – “to put, or place”.
“Septentrional” and “méridional” are still adjectives in modern French, though they are indeed kind of old fashioned and not in common use. One exception : “un méridional” or “des méridionaux”, as substantives, to refer to people who come from the south of France notably the Marseilles region.
Although in the case of “austral” there’s the problem that when “aust” got borrowed by the early Germanic languages, the meaning somehow shifted from south to east. Aust is in fact the root for the word “east” in English and its equivalent in all the other Germanic languages. So using “austral” as a fancy way to say “southern” would been pretty confusing in a lot of the Germanic languages. Of course it also led to the confusing situation with Australia (meaning “southern land”) and Austria (meaning “eastern land.”)
According to the OED, “orient” and “occident” ultimately derive from words that meant “to rise” and “to fall” in other languages (bolding mine):
So it may be that the reason there isn’t a parallel construction for “the north” and “the south” is that the sun doesn’t do anything there.
Similarly, you can use the word “midi,” which normally means “noon,” for south. See, for example, the Gare du Midi in Brussels.
Right. Although now that I really think about it, it’s kind of strange. Noon/midday is at the top of the clock face, which should be a symbol of north, right ? I guess the Sun itself is due south when it is noon, hence the expression ?
Um, the north is called the Arctic, and the south is called the Antarctic ?..in English (and most major european languages ?)
It does do stuff there !
It becomes cancerous and estival, and after a while it turns into a capricorn,
and hiburnal.
Yes.
Yep, I’ve heard “Antipodeans” used to refer to people coming from Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. Technically it would also refer to South Americans but never heard it used that way. This term has some actual usage.
Right…“where the sun sets” or “puts itself [down]”
Similarly, French “levant” = [where the sun is] “rising,” i.e. the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
Antipodes are places directly across the earth from each other. NZ is Antipodal to Europe, specifically central Spain, which is why they are sometimes are known as Antipodeans. The other main Antipodal landmasses are Argentina and Eastern china.
Yes technically, but its a fairly common vernacular usage in British english to refer to people from the Southern hemisphere former colonies as “antipodeans” while Australians / Kiwis / South Africans would not refer to UK people that way.
Antipode is also the name of the longest-running “radical” human-political geography journal – Marxist/feminist/queer/subaltern/post-colonial and the like. Clever title, is it not?
Yeah. ‘Antipodes’ just means (pretty much literally) ‘the opposite of where we’re standing’.
Never really heard it used to refer to South Africans, myself, just ANZACS. Various dictionaries seem to concur.