ਸਿਆਲ਼

What does siyal mean in Punjabi? Siyal (ਸਿਆਲ਼) is a traditional Punjabi word for winter, the cold season of short days, fog and frost. Where the everyday word sardi names the cold itself, siyal names the season as a whole stretch of the year, and in the Punjabi list of seasons it stands opposite hunala, the summer.

What does siyal mean in Punjabi?

Siyal is a masculine noun meaning winter. Wiktionary's entry for winter gives three Punjabi words side by side: sardi, a feminine noun, siyal, a masculine noun, and pala. Preply's guide to the seasons uses the same word in siyal rutt, the winter season, calling it the cold season months in the four-season system and the deep cold months in the older six-season system. So siyal is the season's formal, traditional name, the one a list of rutts reaches for.

How is siyal different from sardi?

Sardi is the word of daily life. People say sardi pai rahi hai, the cold is setting in, and sardi covers both the feeling of cold and the cold season in ordinary talk. Siyal is narrower and older in flavour: it means the winter season itself, not a cold day or a cold wind. You meet it in season lists, in poetry and in the speech of elders, and in the fixed pairing siyal and hunala, winter and summer, the two great halves of the Punjabi year. Both words are understood everywhere; siyal simply carries the calendar with it.

What happens in a Punjabi siyal?

Winter in the northern plains, the months around December to February, brings the season's own world with it. Mornings open under dhund, the thick fog that slows the roads. Frost touches the fields, the days stay short, and in the village people wrap themselves in shawls and sit close to a small fire in the evening. It is the season of sarson da saag on the stove and of Lohri fires at its heart. When a Punjabi speaker calls all of this siyal, the word holds the whole season, not just the temperature.