Ask anyone who skis what his favorite type of snow is. His least favorite: Champaign powder, fat wet flakes, cold fluff, icy crust, I could probably talk for an hour about the different types of snow and the conditions that lead to them. Some types of snow lead to avalanche conditions. Some are dangerous to drive in. Some are a dream to ski, some make you turn around and go home.
Maybe we don’t have singular words for it, but we certainly can describe the differences in language. It would be insane to think otherwise.
With respect to snow and snow-related things, I actually ran into this personally. That thick icy crust on snow that you've described in your comment - it has a dedicated word for it in Russian, наст (nast). It never occurred to me that there isn't an equivalent single word for that in English in 20 years of living in English-speaking countries because it simply doesn't occur in the areas where I live. Until, one day, it did, and I realized that I have to explain-translate it.
(Some other languages that have a dedicated word for that are Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian)
Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.
It's funny but makes a decent argument for the same thing you are. Seems perfectly natural to me.
(Also, any excuse to quote Douglas Adams is worth it...)
And the article asks the reasonable question "what is the difference between having a single word for a thing versus a commonly understood cluster of words?". It's not a hard boundary.
Every translation loses a little bit of information but potentially brings in different connotations. The things that translators and localizers argue about endlessly: do we look for the words that most closely match the other words, or do we look for feeling and meaning that most closely matches the original intent?
I heard the Eskimos have over 50 words for a bad example
^ my favorite t-shirt.
So many of these studies also abuse compound words and misunderstand agglutination to produce their shocking counts.
If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more.
Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.
I wonder how much linguistic distance there is between Inuit languages in the region as compared to, say, Romance languages in Western Europe.
A lot of that is because we use multi-word phrases instead of single words to express a lot of ideas too. Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. Often we have a word but the other person just isn't familiar with it and assumes it doesn't exist, or assumes it's not known because it was borrowed into English.
This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.
Yawn.
https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pd...
> What i do here is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986. Laura Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Cleveland State University. She endures calmly the fact that virtually no one listened to her when she first published. It may be that few will listen to me as I explain in different words to another audience what she pointed out. But the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said they do. Anyone who insists on simply checking their primary sources will find that they are quite unable to document the alleged facts about snow vocabulary (but nobody ever checks, because the truth might not be what the reading public wants to hear).
jnord•1d ago