Vocabulary and Blizzards

In the 1880's, a German-American anthropologist named Franz Boas went to live amongst the Inuits on Baffin Island. In the process of working with them, studying their culture, and learning their language, he remarked that the Eskimoes have a staggering number of words for snow. This factoid has allowed many an elementary schooler to sound really smart and worldly when they tell to their less-informed friends that "Eskimoes have, like, 32 words for snow."

 

The claim has since been disputed by linguists who point out that the Inuit language is polysynthetic. In a polysynthetic language, you can stack a bunch of descriptors together into a single compound word. Where we might say "a drift of powdery snow on the ground," their language would hook all those descriptors together, using words like drift (qimuqsuq) and ground (aput) and snow (patuqun) to make a new colossal uber-word. As a result, their language is a veritable generator for new distinct words for snow and for all kinds of other things. I picture it kind of like German, which has a 41-letter word Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung that translates as a "regulation requiring a prescription for an anesthetic."

 

Other linguists think the claims about the Eskimo snow vocabulary are feasible, citing that the non-polysynthetic language of the Sami people has at least 180 words related to snow or ice, and up to 1000 different words for reindeer.

 

Regardless of how many words the Eskimoes have for snow, it's currently snowing all of them here in St Louis. 



The view from my window right now