5 ms·

About that snow claim... It's more nuanced than that. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/no-the-inuit-dont-have-100-words-for-snow https://www.buzzfeed.com/to

by KGIII 9y ago

About that snow claim... It's more nuanced than that. https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/no-the-inuit-dont-have-100-words-for-snow https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/no-the-inuit-dont-have-1... Sorry about the source URL, but it is actually a good article. I live in the mountains of Maine. We don't have enough words for snow. We do have lots of phrases to describe the many different types of snow, however. And there are lots of types of snow, both as it is falling, how it is as it lands, and how it reacts after the storm. I love the stuff and can probably come up with accurate descriptive phrases for hours.

vacri 9y ago
The power of agglutinative languages. Here is an apparently valid German word that takes one minute to say: https://youtu.be/Brt6F4cGFCY https://youtu.be/Brt6F4cGFCY
- KGIII 9y ago
  Agglutinative... 1. How long have you been waiting to use that in a sentence? 2. German has a word for everything. "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." There is a German word for exactly that. Anyhow, we really could use more words for snow. I've seen stuff falling from the sky that there are no words for. Some of it doesn't defies even simple phrases. As I've said before, I love snow. I do live here for a reason. There are no words for this slush-like substance that falls from the sky, sometimes as small clumps but other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground. This happens usually when the air temp is just a bit above freezing, it is warmer down in the valley than it is here, and the higher air remains pretty warm until there is a cut-off a few thousand feet above you and the air gets much colder. Also, it tends to be high ambient moisture content to the point where you have a moderately dense fog. There's probably a German word for that, but there's none in English and I doubt the Inuit people have one either. Seriously, there is a lot of different types of snow. I didn't realize there were this many until I retired and moved here. Now I know... By the way, the locals would call that 'the start of a good old fashioned New England shit-storm.' It often ends with frozen rain or sleet. I could go on for hours about the different types of snow. 100 words wouldn't even begin to cut it.
  - ma2rten 9y ago
    "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." I don't think there is a German word for that? What is that word?
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Oh, I don't really speak German and was making that up. But, it wouldn't surprise me if they had such a word. German likes to cram words together and make really long, very precise, words. I don't speak it well enough to guess what this would be, but I do understand a little. This is the first search result for one search: http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabulary/ http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabu...
      - samsari 9y ago
        They don't. Compound words in Germanic languages are basically always nouns. So you'd have to rephrase your example a bit to make a German (or Swedish, etc) word out of it.
  - henrikeh 9y ago
    I guess it depends on your definition of “a word”. I speak Danish and it shares a lot of concepts with German. Joining or concatenating two nouns or a noun and an adjective form “a new word”, but the meaning is of course based upon the two other words. So if I were to construct a word about the car, I could go like: anden-gears-sving-fejltænding. (Literally, second gear turn misfire). Typically hyphens are omitted, but they are optional. Is that a new word? Not in Danish, it is just four other written with no spaces in between. Written together they describe a specific situation/concept. But there is no new word.
    - ivanhoe 9y ago
      Is this the same concept as when in English or other languages one does: those-words-with-hyphens (e.g. "this is a not-very-good-with-german type of question")
- FabHK 9y ago
  > agglutinative Or as my math professor friend likes to say, “German is closed under concatenation” (and “Latin under permutation”) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(mathematics)
zimpenfish 9y ago
See also Geoff Pullum's classic "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf

by KGIII 9y ago

vacri 9y ago

The power of agglutinative languages. Here is an apparently valid German word that takes one minute to say: https://youtu.be/Brt6F4cGFCY https://youtu.be/Brt6F4cGFCY

KGIII 9y ago
Agglutinative... 1. How long have you been waiting to use that in a sentence? 2. German has a word for everything. "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." There is a German word for exactly that. Anyhow, we really could use more words for snow. I've seen stuff falling from the sky that there are no words for. Some of it doesn't defies even simple phrases. As I've said before, I love snow. I do live here for a reason. There are no words for this slush-like substance that falls from the sky, sometimes as small clumps but other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground. This happens usually when the air temp is just a bit above freezing, it is warmer down in the valley than it is here, and the higher air remains pretty warm until there is a cut-off a few thousand feet above you and the air gets much colder. Also, it tends to be high ambient moisture content to the point where you have a moderately dense fog. There's probably a German word for that, but there's none in English and I doubt the Inuit people have one either. Seriously, there is a lot of different types of snow. I didn't realize there were this many until I retired and moved here. Now I know... By the way, the locals would call that 'the start of a good old fashioned New England shit-storm.' It often ends with frozen rain or sleet. I could go on for hours about the different types of snow. 100 words wouldn't even begin to cut it.
- ma2rten 9y ago
  "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." I don't think there is a German word for that? What is that word?
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Oh, I don't really speak German and was making that up. But, it wouldn't surprise me if they had such a word. German likes to cram words together and make really long, very precise, words. I don't speak it well enough to guess what this would be, but I do understand a little. This is the first search result for one search: http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabulary/ http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabu...
    - samsari 9y ago
      They don't. Compound words in Germanic languages are basically always nouns. So you'd have to rephrase your example a bit to make a German (or Swedish, etc) word out of it.
- henrikeh 9y ago
  I guess it depends on your definition of “a word”. I speak Danish and it shares a lot of concepts with German. Joining or concatenating two nouns or a noun and an adjective form “a new word”, but the meaning is of course based upon the two other words. So if I were to construct a word about the car, I could go like: anden-gears-sving-fejltænding. (Literally, second gear turn misfire). Typically hyphens are omitted, but they are optional. Is that a new word? Not in Danish, it is just four other written with no spaces in between. Written together they describe a specific situation/concept. But there is no new word.
  - ivanhoe 9y ago
    Is this the same concept as when in English or other languages one does: those-words-with-hyphens (e.g. "this is a not-very-good-with-german type of question")
FabHK 9y ago
> agglutinative Or as my math professor friend likes to say, “German is closed under concatenation” (and “Latin under permutation”) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(mathematics)

zimpenfish 9y ago

See also Geoff Pullum's classic "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf