Winters

Here's an interesting bit of info: In the old English language (which existed before Shakespeare's time) years were counted in terms of winters. And days in terms of nights.

Allan Metcalf writes on his Lingua Franca blog:  Beowulf the Great, hero of the Old English epic, boasts of his victory in a swimming contest: "We two together were at sea five nights, till the flood drove us apart. 

In the second part of the poem, we are told that Beowulf became king back in his homeland and ruled for 50 winters. Then he had to fight a dragon that slept for 300 winters. The dragon, in turn, was protecting a treasure hoard that had been buried for 1,000 winters.

According to Metcalf, this was so, because the ancestors of the tribes which brought English to British isles lived in northern Europe, where winters and nights are long, and, which "made a great impression" on them. 

On reading this, I immediately thought of the Marathi way of describing passage of years: `Mi tujya-peksha don paavsalae jaast paahile aahet' (`I have lived through a couple of more monsoons than you, you see'). Does this phrase exist in any of the other Indian languages?  I am curious.