Permafrost

Permafrost
 

Dear Members of the Forum,

I am hoping that someone will be able to to translate, into Spanish, the word permafrost. In the higher latitudes, such as from the middle of Greenland and above, the surface freezes over with a frost that penetrates about six inches deep. Needless to say, it is impossible to grow a garden at these latitudes!

Does anyone know how to express this polar phenomonon in Spanish?

Thanks in advance,

Dean

Exactly the same word -with Spanish pronunciation-: permafrost.

Most Spanish words about polar regions are loans from French and English:

permafrost
banquisa (sea ice)

Even "glaciar" -from French- improved the general notion of "hielos eternos" -which remains as a synonym-.

The only word in Spanish I know related to that topic -other than "nieve" (snow) and all its derivatives and varieties- is "carámbano" (icicle).

The entry for "permafrost" at this English->Spanish entry at WordReference.com has some suggestions.

Aquí también tienes opciones:
http://www.proz.com/kudoz/english_to...ermafrost.html

Interesting, but all of them but "permafrost" are sort of "portmanteau" translations, sort of "we have to come up with something" used in a few instances.

"Permafrost" is not only the only word for this in DRAE, but the only one with cases in both historic and current corpora form RAE. There are hundreds of cases of "el permafrost" using book search in Google, while the other concoctions gather just a handful.

Most of those anomalies are much probably Wikipedia-born or promoted. A tragedy of our time. I'm editing that entry to patch that mistake.

"Gelisuelo", that has a few more instances, in Spain, in the 20th century (losing 20 to 1 to permafrost among the bibliography).

Permafrost Again
 

Well ...

Alec Cowan, you have certainly offered a unique perspecive or two!

I would think that gelisuelo would be the most "castizo" of all, but RAE favors the Emglish term permafrost.

As they say, "go figure!" .

Dean

It looks gelisol (French and English, gelisuelo in Spanish) is used referring to soils that aren't frozen all the year around, or completely within two meters from the soil surface, so the only translation is permafrost.

In French, permafrost is called pergelisol.