From the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – BERKELEY, and ‘your tax dollars at work’ department:
Fresh look at trope about Eskimo words for snow
Researchers take on urban legend about Arctic vocabulary
That old trope about there being at least 50 Eskimo words for snow has a new twist.
Researchers at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University have taken a fresh look at words for snow, taking on an urban legend referred to by some as “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.”
But instead of counting the words for snow used by Inuit, Yupik and other natives of the Arctic regions, as others have done, they looked at how people in warmer climates speak of snow and ice compared to their cold-weather counterparts.
“We found that languages from warm parts of the world are more likely to use the same word for snow and ice,” said Alexandra Carstensen, a doctoral student in psychology and co-author of the study published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
The finding that people in warmer regions are less likely to distinguish between ice and snow indirectly supports a claim by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911 that the words used to describe different types of snow in Arctic languages reflect the “chief interests of a people.”
By the same principle, people in warmer climates, where snow is less of a concern, are less likely to care as much about the difference between snow and ice, and so use one word to describe both, just as Hawaiians use the word hau for snow and ice.
To test that theory, researchers used multiple dictionaries and linguistic and meteorological data — as well as Google Translate and Twitter — to conduct an extensive search for words for snow and ice in nearly 300 diverse languages. They then linked those words to local climates and geography worldwide.
“We wanted to broaden the investigation past Eskimo languages in particular,” said study senior author Charles Kemp, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. “The idea that languages reflect the needs of their speakers is general, and can be explored using data from all over the world.”
The study builds on the team’s previous research showing how language is shaped by our need to communicate precisely and efficiently.
“We think that terms for snow and ice reveal the same basic principle at work, modulated by local communicative need,” said study lead author Terry Regier, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley.
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A list of Finnish word for different kinds of snow
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luettelo_lunta_tarkoittavista_suomen_kielen_sanoista (may not be complete)
Another one (may not be complete either)
http://saaressa.blogspot.fi/2010/01/lumisanat.html
Who cares about Eskimos and snow where you living in Scotland:
Scots: more words for rain than Eskimos for snow
That’s sad. But if the were to warm, it would become warm rain!
/the world/
I cannot understand why there are so many different words … when the real difference is between rain that comes down and rain that doesn’t. That is to say …. horizontal rain … rain that no umbrella or even a English raincoat can hold out.
I wonder if they were paid by the word.
Living in the far north, aka Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, one gets used to discussing a number of topics using a simple descriptive.
e.g., in both Pennsy and Mass, skiing was always used to describe the various methods of plummeting downhill while wearing slats on one’s feet.
While any effort to describe wearing similar foot slats whilst towed by a watercraft absolutely requires the descriptive adjective ‘water’, e.g. ‘water skiing’.
Moving to warmer climes, e.g. Louisiana or Arizona, discussion using the simple descriptive ‘skiing’ always describes getting towed by watercraft. Any and all attempts to describe the winter activity of wearing slats on one’s feet while enjoying an exhilarating terrifying controlled fall on snow/ice absolutely requires the descriptive adjective ‘snow’, e.g. ‘snow skiing’.
Perhaps, I should request a grant to try and find the exact dividing line around the world where North meets South or South meets North?
Then again, there is the rather absurd differences in colloquial language surrounding ‘climate speak’ where vague correlations and loose assumptions means ‘science’ to the inflammatory carbon dioxide groups and ‘utter trash’ the scientifically literate.
If we paid for this crap there are probably a limitless number of words for dumbass and sucker.
The Norwegian language has about 400 words for snow and snow related conditions such as weather
http://folk.ntnu.no/ivarse/snjoord.html
Hmmm. Why do you think your tax dollars funded this research? Unless you can provide a link to the paper, it would be difficult to tell. Usually linguistic studies don’t require much of a budget (in the low 10s of thousands of dollars), and there are plenty of private granting orgs who can underwrite this sort of research. Yes, the NSF sometimes funds linguistic research, but I’m sure their social sciences research budget is somewhat less than say the $1.5 Trillion we’ve wasted on developing the F-35–a jet that maybe might just possibly be able to fly this year without crashing. The headline reminds of the Yiddish language which has more words than any language for describing various kinds of unpleasant people–although they haven’t developed a word yet for chronic ax whiners. 😉
sorry for the typo. I meant “chronic tax whiners.” But they do have phrase for someone who whines about their government–shtayer krekhtser. Interesting.
So how many words are there in the English language for scammer? We may need to add some more
When I was studying Chinese at the Defense Language Institute our Mandarin program was a special trial program from Georgetown University Language Resource Center. It was based on the principles of the (in)famous psycholinguistic professor Leonard J. McCaskey. It wasn’t a very good way to learn Chinese but it was interesting the way most every lesson was designed to showcase that a peoples’ language is formed by its environment.
Google translate? Immediate fail in any grade school language class.
“We wanted to broaden the investigation past Eskimo languages in particular,”
WHY? [just because you are a psychology professor doesn’t count!]
An interesting situation exists for AGW. There must be at least 50 meanings for the words “climate change” and “global warming” in the language of the Warmistas. These rich, universal homonym phrases embrace everything form temperatures going up, down or doing nothing, and on every scale from statistically insignificant to “dangerous so you must pay money now … urgently”. The only thing lacking is a definition not so vague as to be used in some sort of scientific context.
The language of the Eskimo has a complex morphology that makes long words. The thing is that some of the morphemes are akin to adjectives and adverbs. So what we say things like: blowing snow, snow on the ground, snow that crunches when you walk on it, snow that’s good for sledding, powder, dirty snow, deep snow, etc; We could also say we also have at least fifty ways of saying snow.
Just think, there are a countably infinite number of words for integers, and an uncountably infinite number of ‘words’ for real numbers.
Skiers have lots of words for snow. Ski resorts only have one: “powder”. Well maybe two, some also use “packed” when they mean “ice”.
How many words are there for “BS”?
Heavy wet snow in the Cascades is called cement and concrete.
I grew up in Switzerland and spent a lot of time in the Alps. In my own german dialect I can easily list 20 words for snow and ice. I would not have to travel 100km to find another two or three dozen of them. So
I wonder how many words climate alarmists have for lying?
Long long ago, in a place far far away, I skimmed an article that debunked “50 words for snow”. The false assumption was that each of the 50 words described a different type of snow providing distinct information about it. Not the case at all.
Using an English example since I don’t do Eskimo — what is the difference between “powder snow” and “dry snow”? You can find dictionary definitions of each where the other phrase is used to define it. Now you can make the claim that “powder snow places an emphasis on the physicality of the snow while “dry snow” places an emphasis on the free water content of the snow — but HELL, they both describe exactly the same type of snow!
The Eskimo language, like English, is filled with such redundancies which the naive (or paper hungry) researchers claimed had separate meanings. I think the conclusion of the debunking article was that the Eskimo language had about as many “real defining words” to describe snow as did English — meaning not that many.
Eugene WR Gallun. .
The obvious conclusion from all this is that global warming threatens to make many Eskimo words obsolete. The situation is even worse than we thought!
And in other news, artists who use oil paints or water colors for a living have a much greater vocabulary and knowledge of various shades of color than coal miners.
ferdberple ( April 15, 2016 at 6:32 am ),
Re your listing of Eskimo words for snow in English (snow, slush, sleet, hail, powder, hard pack, blizzard, flurries, flake, dusting, crust, avalanche, drift, frost, glacier and iceberg, to name but a few.):
If these Eskimo words exist in English as well, that would logically mean that English has just as many words for snow as the Eskimos! Maybe more? Hehe.
thankfully western minds have developed adjectives to further describe the various types of snow.
I have yet to see the ancient eskimo written language describing snow.
there is also the dreaded yellow snow and then the brown snow (they didn’t have 50 words for toilet paper or in fact toilet paper. maybe they used snow-paper
The vocabulary of pizza https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2016/04/15/tried-40-types-pizza/
For all the ski bums out there, we have around 50 words for snow as well. Some more descriptive than others. From Champagne powder to Sierra Cement. There are a lot.
It’s quite obvious that people who spend their lives with and in snow, also have a lot of words for snow and different states of snow. Here is a list of 100 Norwegian words for snow … and the list is far from complete:
http://indexnorvegica.blogspot.no/2010/09/100-norske-ord-for-sn.html