The weather forecast

The eighth entry is a carta sinóptica, and its first noun is one word in Portuguese where English keeps three. Behind all of them stands the Latin charta, a sheet of papyrus, which reached us by several roads and arrived each time in a different shape. Through Old French it gave « card », the stiff rectangle of a playing pack. It gave « chart », a sheet covered with lines rather than with words, which is why a forecaster draws a weather chart and a sailor reads a sea chart, while a « map » stays on land and shows what is there rather than what has been measured. And from the diminutive chartula it gave « charter », the sheet that grants a right. Portuguese did none of that dividing. A carta is the letter you post, the card in the pack, the chart on the wall and the charter of a city, and the sentence around it does the sorting. Two things follow for anyone turning this entry into English. This carta is a chart and never a letter. And the sheet pinned up in a forecasting room keeps the name chart, not map.