Eskimo words for snow

[pne]

There are some people who believe that Eskimo have some large number of words for snow, and/or that this is somehow significant.

Someone on a mailing list just pointed out that English has nearly 100 terms for different clouds (though many of those are a basic noun combined with a more specific adjective).

I wonder whether English speakers are obsessed with clouds, then.

Comments

[yvi]

There are some people who believe that Eskimo have some large number of words for snow, and/or that this is somehow significant.

As far as I know, they don't actually, right? It's just their language structure that makes it appear like there's a lot of words when actually they are noun+adjective combinations or something?

Someone on a mailing list just pointed out that English has nearly 100 terms for different clouds (though many of those are a basic noun combined with a more specific adjective).

And, well, Latin and Greek ;)

I actually think that it's like saying English has a million words for insects, when, actually, those are species names. Still, fascinating.

[pne]

As far as I know, they don't actually, right?

It depends on how you count, but I gather they don't have an unusually large number of roots for snow. (Some say 6 or so, though recently I've seen plausible-looking longer lists.)

But then, depending on how relaxed you are about what's a "word for snow", even English has lots of them: snow, blizzard, snowdrift, snowball, igloo, sleet, slush, hail, icicle, ice, powder, firn, ...

It's just their language structure that makes it appear like there's a lot of words when actually they are noun+adjective combinations or something?

Yes, there is that, too: the various Eskimo languages are agglutinating, so you can make very long words that are probably the equivalent of entire sentences in English, by tacking on lots of additional bits onto a basic word.

So you could equally well claim that Eskimos have dozens/hundreds/thousands of words for caribou, or people, or computers.

[ewx]

Referring to “Eskimo” is also kind of like referring to “European” as if there were one language for the whole continent.

As for specifics; West Greenlandic has two words for snow and they are qanik and aput.

[pne]

I can't open that PDF file ("This file is corrupted and cannot be repaired", or some such).

But I had also been pointed to 49 words for snow and ice from West Greenlandic and 15 lexemes for snow from Yup'ik.

Though the first list has most of its entries being more ice-related than snow-related, and a couple of the snow-related words appear to be derivatives of aput (e.g. aputitaq "snow patch", apusiniq "snowdrift"), but there are also a few which don't seem to be related (e.g. mangiggal/mangikaajaaq "hard snow", nittaallat "snowflakes").

[pne]

Referring to “Eskimo” is also kind of like referring to “European” as if there were one language for the whole continent.

Not sure whether "European" is the right comparison or whether it should be something like "Romance" or "Germanic". But yes, there's more than one "Eskimo" language.

(On the other hand, there are people who call all Eskimos "Inuit", which is perhaps like calling someone from Glasgow "English". And apparently, calling the language of most Eskimos "Inuit" is also wrong, like saying that a Hispanic person speaks "Hispanic".)

[slowfox]

The English, as I'm sure you're aware, are famously obsessed with the weather, so it wouldn't surprise me.

I do remember, years ago, my parents picking up a French/English dictionary - I think it was a Larousse - whilst on holiday in France. In it, they had a diagram denoting the various field-placings in cricket: the English descriptions (of which there were squillions) were all things like 'silly mid on', 'square fine leg' and the like. I forget the French word, now, but every single field placing in French was 'catcher' :-)