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Eskimo words for snow
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It is a popular urban legend that the Inuit or Eskimo have an unusually large number of words for snow.
In reality, the number of words depends on the definitions of Eskimo (there are a number of languages) and snow, and on the method of counting numbers of words in languages that have quite different grammatical structures from English.
first reference to Eskimo having multiple words for snow is in the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas.
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It is a popular urban legend that the Inuit or Eskimo have an unusually large number of words for snow.
In reality, the number of words depends on the definitions of Eskimo (there are a number of languages) and snow, and on the method of counting numbers of words in languages that have quite different grammatical structures from English.
Origins and significance of the legend
The first reference to Eskimo having multiple words for snow is in the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. He says:
- ...just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning 'water' in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput 'snow on the ground', gana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift'.
The essential morphological question is why a language would say, for example, "lake", "river", and "brook" instead of something like "waterplace", "waterfast", and "waterslow". English has more than one snow-related word, but Boas' intent was to connect differences in culture with differences in language.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativism holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world. This idea is also reflected in the concept behind General Semantics. In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having seven distinct words for snow. Later writers inflated the figure: by 1978, the number quoted had reached 50, and on February 9, 1984, an editorial in The New York Times gave the number as one hundred.
The idea that Eskimos had so many words for snow has given rise to the idea that Eskimos viewed snow very differently from people of other cultures. For example, when it snows, others see snow, but Eskimos could see any manifestation of their great and varied vocabulary. Vulgarized versions of Whorf's views hold not only that Eskimo speakers can choose among several snow words, but that they do not categorize all seven (or however many) as "snow": to them, each word is supposedly a separate concept. Thus language is thought to impose a particular view of the world — not just for Eskimo languages, but for all groups.
Focal vocabulary hypothesis
Part of the supposition is that Eskimo languages would have a focal vocabulary with several extra words to describe snow, which is specifically the point of Boas's theory. They deal with snow more than other cultures, just as artists have more words to describe the various details of their profession — what a non-artist calls "paint", the artist identifies as "oil paint", "acrylic paint", or "watercolor". This does not mean that these two individuals are observing two different objects, nor does it mean that the artist would be confused by the idea that oil paint and acrylic paint are related. Likewise in English, the words "blizzard", "flurry", "pack", and "powder" refer to different types of snow, but all are recognized as "snow" in the general sense.
Defining "Eskimo"
There is no one Eskimo language. A number of cultures are referred to as Eskimo, and a number of different languages are termed Eskimo-Aleut languages. These languages may have a few more or fewer, depending on which Eskimo language is considered.
Word boundary issues
There are several issues regarding the definition of "word":
- Inflection can create several permutations of the same root (lexeme). (Most writers count lexemes, not inflectional variants, in their comparisons.)
- Polysynthetic languages can mechanistically combine what would be several words in a phrase in another language into a single "word".
- English compounds and compounds in other languages can be written with a space, creating controversy over whether a "word" should be defined by an orthographic word divider or by lexeme status (whether a compound has an independent entry in a dictionary or lexicon).
- The same morpheme can appear in multiple lexemes, creating controversy over whether the lexemes are sufficiently "different".
Eskimo word synthesis
By some definitions of "word", the number of Eskimo words for snow is approximately as large as the number of English sentences that can contain the word "snow", because Eskimo languages (like many native North American languages) are polysynthetic. Polysynthetic languages allow noun incorporation, resulting in a single compound word that is the equivalent of a phrase in other languages (Spencer 1991). The Eskimo languages have systems of derivational suffixes for word formation to which speakers can recursively add snow-referring roots. As in English, there are a handful of these snow-referring roots, such as for "snowflake", "blizzard", "drift". What an English speaker would describe as "frosty sparkling snow" a speaker of an Eskimo language such as Inuinnaqtun would call "patuqun", and express "is covered in frosty sparkling snow" as "patuqutaujuq", much as an English speaker might use "sleet" and "sleet-covered". Arguably the concept is the same in both languages. This is true of things other than snow: "qinmiq" means "dog", "qinmiarjuk" "young dog", and "qinmiqtuqtuq" "goes by dog team".
Compounding and orthography
A word may be a compound and a compound may have a space in it. Thus, a word may have a space in it.
A dictionary definition of compound is 'a word made of words' like firefighter, study hour, and left-handed)". Thus, high school with a space is one word.
English compound elements that are themselves English words may be written open (e.g. particle board), hyphenated (e.g. particle-board), or solid (e.g. particleboard).
A word pair over time often becomes a compound, definitely so when the primary stress is on the first element.
Word lists
Generalists' words
Computational linguist Steven J. Derose lists the following as snow-related English words in general use: avalanche, berg, blizzard, cornice, crevasse, dusting, floe, flurry, freezing rain, frost, glacier, glare ice, hardpack, hoarfrost, ice, iceball, iceberg, icecap, ice crystal, ice field, ice storm, icicle, new-fallen snow, powder, rime, slush, snowball, snowbank, snowcap, snowdrift, snowfall, snowflake, snowlike, snowstorm, and yellow snow. He suggests that skiers may have more words.
One thesaurus, apparently for a general nonspecialist audience, includes black frost, corn snow, crystal, driven snow, firn, flake, frost line, frost smoke, granular snow, graupel, hailstone, hailstorm, hard frost, hoar, ice needle, iceshockle, igloo, killing frost, mantle of snow, mogul, névé (not neve), rime frost, sharp frost, slosh, snow banner, snow bed, snow blanket, snow blast, snowbridge (distinct from a human-made avalanche snow bridge), snow-crystal, snow dust, snowfield, snow flurry, snowhouse, snow ice, snowland, snow line, snowpack, snow pellets, snowscape, snowslide, snowslip, snow squall, snow slush, snow wreath, soft hail, spring corn, spring snow, tapioca snow, wet snow, and white frost and, perhaps as metaphors, includes forms or variants of feathered rain, pure and grandfather moss, and whitening shower.
Specialists' words
Avalanche specialists, and perhaps other specialists such as meteorologists and climatologists, whose first natural language is English also have many words in English for snow, including columns, graupel, hail, needles, plates, and sleet, each being a different kind of snow.
There may be as many as 80 terms, some of which are words, according to another professional classificatory scheme, intended for meteorology. Among the 80 are pyramid and broken branch, conelike graupel, graupellike snow (several types), ice particle, irregular germ, lump graupel, minute column, miscellaneous, and side planes.
Additional words found in academe include arrowhead twins, bullet rosettes, capped bullets, crossed needles, crossed plates, cups, double plates, irregulars, isolated bullets, multiply capped columns, needle clusters, radiating dendrites, radiating plates, rimed, scrolls or plates (considered as 2 words, not as 1 word or phrase), sectored plates, sheaths, simple needles, simple prisms, simple stars, skeletal forms, solid columns, stellar dendrites, stellar plates, triangular forms, 12-branched stars, and twin columns; and surface hoar, frost flowers (different from another kind of frost flower), and feather frost. Designer snowflakes include snow stars, chandelier crystal, and fishbones.
See also
External links
Explanations
Lists of Eskimo words
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