6 ms·

Inuits have hundreds of words for sea ice (2013)

37 points by kasperni 5y ago

GordonS 5y ago
I was randomly thinking about this the other day, and trying to think of things in English that have many words for the same thing (or variants of that thing). I didn't think on it long, but only came up a few things: sex, genitalia, faeces and cannabis.
pmdulaney 5y ago
I do think this is a pretty amazing list, despite what the naysayers say. But my question is why? What practical purpose does this fine-grained vocabulary serve? Are the people coining these words bored out of their minds, like a patient in the doctor's office counting the holes in the acoustic tiles?
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  We have fine-grained vocabulary for snow in English too. Ask any skiier. I can tell you for certain we have hundreds of words for flowing water in English but I never figured that English people were bored when they coined a brook vs a stream vs a spring.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  For people living in the Arctic, ice and snow define the physical geography of their lives for over half the year and navigating that geography was/is essential to survival and recreation. Different kinds have different properties and different dangers to consider. Having distinct words for them is like saying mountain vs hill vs mesa, or river vs stream.
werdnapk 5y ago
If you think about some tool or piece of equipment that has names for all the different parts that you had no idea even had names, but the people in that industry that use that tool require those names to make communication amongst themselves easier. You can think of the "ice" and all of its "parts" important for those that spend much of their livelihood on and around it. If you're hunting or in a life or death situation in this environment, you'll want to be concise with your communication.
- earthbee 5y ago
  Geologists have thousands of words for rock
  - jpwagner 5y ago
    ^ nailed it
- stan_rogers 5y ago
  You also need to take "word" with a grain of salt, since we're dealing with a highly polysynthetic language. Many of those "words" would be substantial chunks of sentences to speakers of most other languages, with elements we'd think of as "words" being reduced to, say, a vowel or a vowel change in one of the other "word" elements. Language is really, really neat.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    Yeah, the dictionary https://archive.org/details/kinikmisigumqan00weya https://archive.org/details/kinikmisigumqan00weya lists many terms that are obviously related: Sigu: Ocean pack ice, also a generic term that refers to all sea ice, including shore-fast ice Siguliaq: Young ice, gray or gray-white in color Siguliaksraq: “That which will become young ice”, grease ice Also, they're not all terms for ice, they might just be related to life on the ice: Arjuun: Paddle or oar; can be used to listen for sea mammal vocalizations underwater
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  My linguistics professor in Colorado drove this point home by asking the skiers in the class to list their words for “snow”. I think we got over 50 in just a few minutes. Powder, corduroy, groomed, slushy, mogul, etc
- amalcon 5y ago
  For the software crowd: We have at least hundreds of terms for "data structure". E.g. tree, binary tree, binary search tree, red-black tree, for just one path down the taxonomy of data structures. If I'm talking to a lay person, I generally just call all of them "data structure" unless they express deeper curiosity.
awb 5y ago
It’s really interesting they have so many unique words for ice because the top 100 words in the Oxford English Corpus make up about 50% of all of written English. I wonder how often these words for ice are actually used in practice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English > According to The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, the first 25 words in the OEC make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and the first 100 words make up about half of all written English.
- lgessler 5y ago
  Zipf's law has been found to be very robust empirically, so you can also assume the same holds (top 100 account for 50% of volume) for Inuit languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
lgessler 5y ago
As a counterpoint from a linguist, everyone who's intrigued by this or the (nearly a century old!) "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" trope should read Geoff Pullum's "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax"[0]: "The tale [...] is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people's languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself." "Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact." "Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng's Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos... snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes..." (p. 137). Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers... fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes..." Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation." "The final words of Laura Martin's paper are about her hope that we can come to see the Eskimo snow story as a cautionary tale reminding us of "the intellectual protection to be found in the careful use of sources, the clear presentation of evidence, and above all, the constant evaluation of our assumptions."" [0] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf Edit: like topaz0 points out, the point of the scholarly work this article describes is to preserve indigenous knowledge and language, which is great, though I think it's still important to raise Pullum's points as a tonic for the exoticism that inevitably arises here, arguably even within the news article.
- topaz0 5y ago
  Agreed. The Pullum article is one of my favorites.
aerovistae 5y ago
I always found this remarkable until someone pointed out in a book or article somewhere that the same is somewhat true in English for water. We have countless words for water depending on context -- river, ocean, sea, rain, reservoir, stream, brook, mist, wave, deluge, downpour, ice, snow, h20, cloud, fog, dew, hail, brine, precipitation, pond, lake, waterfall, condensation, canal, bay, channel, inlet, gulf, ford, snowflake, pool, waterspout, iceberg, lagoon, flume, spring, estuary, irrigation -- technically all of these refer to the same substance, just in different forms and places. It's the same in the Inuit language.
- m463 5y ago
  Hmm... you're right. dry, damp, foggy, misty, drizzle, sprinkles, showers, rain, downpour, deluge, torrent.
- azeirah 5y ago
  You bring up a good analogy, I feel like it doesn't take away the remarkable feeling for me however! I can only come up with three-ish words for sea-ice. Although I do have many more concepts in my mind Ice, iceberg, floating ice.. The fascinating this is when I learned that what you can communicate influences how you see and experience the world. Language has always fascinated me in that way I do know more _concepts_ for sea ice though! Meters-thick ice plateaus safe to live on for years (where ice bears live and hunt and so on) Watery slushy ice you can easily sail navigate through with a boat. 50-200cm thick ice you can't go through with a small boat, thick enough to walk on. Small ice platforms floating on the water, technically thick enough to stand on but what's the point since it's maybe 2 meters in diameter? There're probably many more types of ice worth having a concept and eventually even a word for. If hunting is important for you, and there's a specific formation/type of ice where sea-lions typically gather, it's great to have a word for that! A lot of a people's culture and a lot of individual's personal experience is embedded in the language they speak.
  - taeric 5y ago
    I would hazard it isn't your culture that is /embedded/ in the language, per se. It is more that your experiences are /compressed/ into your language. You save no time by having shortened words for things that you could describe easily enough, if you aren't having to do so on a regular basis. As an easy, for me, example. Consider the manipulation of cards. For most folks, you can flip a card. Rotate a card. Put a card on a table. Put a card in a stack on a table. Put it in a pile on a table. Etc., If you are a gamer, you draw a card, discard, tap, activate, hide, trash, remove, etc.. All have distinct differences that are only signified because they happen so often in a game that it wouldn't make sense not to compress them down. Moving back to ice, I would hazard that there is probably not that many words for "sea-ice" in situations that are not encountered. Would love to know if I am wrong. (e.g., Asteroids made of salt water. Planets of frozen water? I could actually see either of those being in lore, but not sure.)
topaz0 5y ago
Most of the comments here are making perfectly valid points about the whizz-bang "fact" from the title of the post. Note, however, that the actual topic of the article is very different: it's about an effort that was made to preserve native knowledge of sea-ice hunting that is being lost as both the Inupiaq language and the environment that it has long been situated in are fading. It is notably not about counting how many words there are for a particular thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the title was a joking reference to the "great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" that others are referring to here.
kasperni 5y ago
Here is the actual dictionary for those interested [1]. [1] https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/94115/kinikmisigumqan00weya.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/94115/kinik...
patchorang 5y ago
There are dozens of words for snow in American English. If you have ever skied you've probably at least encountered "powder". If you regularly backcountry ski you will have a huge vocabulary to describe snow, snow conditions, and the snowpack. I don't think it's all that surprising that Inuits would have so many words to describe snow, if you spend any amount of in snowy conditions you will too.
tediousdemise 5y ago
I bet they don't have words for sand or coconuts.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Inuit have 50 words for everything. In that language group, there are modifiers that change the word, so what might be a phrase in 'western' languages becomes a word. Nothing to see here folks; move along.
dev_tty01 5y ago
Language is fascinating. I was chatting with a friend from India and used the phrase "time is money." She looked at me with a funny expression and asked how I knew that. I explained the origins and meaning of the phrase and she laughed. She said that in her mother tongue the word for money sounds just like the English word "time." I wonder how many of these localized, regional dialects will be lost over the coming decades.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
reminds me of Smilla's Sense of Snow, where this idea plays a role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film...
oxfordmale 5y ago
It is likely as mythical as the claim that Inuits have more hand hundred words for snow.

37 points by kasperni 5y ago

I was randomly thinking about this the other day, and trying to think of things in English that have many words for the same thing (or variants of that thing). I didn't think on it long, but only came up a few things: sex, genitalia, faeces and cannabis.

pmdulaney 5y ago

I do think this is a pretty amazing list, despite what the naysayers say. But my question is why? What practical purpose does this fine-grained vocabulary serve? Are the people coining these words bored out of their minds, like a patient in the doctor's office counting the holes in the acoustic tiles?

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
We have fine-grained vocabulary for snow in English too. Ask any skiier. I can tell you for certain we have hundreds of words for flowing water in English but I never figured that English people were bored when they coined a brook vs a stream vs a spring.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
For people living in the Arctic, ice and snow define the physical geography of their lives for over half the year and navigating that geography was/is essential to survival and recreation. Different kinds have different properties and different dangers to consider. Having distinct words for them is like saying mountain vs hill vs mesa, or river vs stream.

werdnapk 5y ago

If you think about some tool or piece of equipment that has names for all the different parts that you had no idea even had names, but the people in that industry that use that tool require those names to make communication amongst themselves easier. You can think of the "ice" and all of its "parts" important for those that spend much of their livelihood on and around it. If you're hunting or in a life or death situation in this environment, you'll want to be concise with your communication.

earthbee 5y ago
Geologists have thousands of words for rock
- jpwagner 5y ago
  ^ nailed it
stan_rogers 5y ago
You also need to take "word" with a grain of salt, since we're dealing with a highly polysynthetic language. Many of those "words" would be substantial chunks of sentences to speakers of most other languages, with elements we'd think of as "words" being reduced to, say, a vowel or a vowel change in one of the other "word" elements. Language is really, really neat.
- yorwba 5y ago
  Yeah, the dictionary https://archive.org/details/kinikmisigumqan00weya https://archive.org/details/kinikmisigumqan00weya lists many terms that are obviously related: Sigu: Ocean pack ice, also a generic term that refers to all sea ice, including shore-fast ice Siguliaq: Young ice, gray or gray-white in color Siguliaksraq: “That which will become young ice”, grease ice Also, they're not all terms for ice, they might just be related to life on the ice: Arjuun: Paddle or oar; can be used to listen for sea mammal vocalizations underwater
wanderingstan 5y ago
My linguistics professor in Colorado drove this point home by asking the skiers in the class to list their words for “snow”. I think we got over 50 in just a few minutes. Powder, corduroy, groomed, slushy, mogul, etc
amalcon 5y ago
For the software crowd: We have at least hundreds of terms for "data structure". E.g. tree, binary tree, binary search tree, red-black tree, for just one path down the taxonomy of data structures. If I'm talking to a lay person, I generally just call all of them "data structure" unless they express deeper curiosity.

awb 5y ago

It’s really interesting they have so many unique words for ice because the top 100 words in the Oxford English Corpus make up about 50% of all of written English. I wonder how often these words for ice are actually used in practice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English > According to The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, the first 25 words in the OEC make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and the first 100 words make up about half of all written English.

lgessler 5y ago
Zipf's law has been found to be very robust empirically, so you can also assume the same holds (top 100 account for 50% of volume) for Inuit languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

lgessler 5y ago

As a counterpoint from a linguist, everyone who's intrigued by this or the (nearly a century old!) "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" trope should read Geoff Pullum's "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax"[0]: "The tale [...] is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people's languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself." "Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact." "Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng's Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos... snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes..." (p. 137). Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers... fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes..." Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation." "The final words of Laura Martin's paper are about her hope that we can come to see the Eskimo snow story as a cautionary tale reminding us of "the intellectual protection to be found in the careful use of sources, the clear presentation of evidence, and above all, the constant evaluation of our assumptions."" [0] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf Edit: like topaz0 points out, the point of the scholarly work this article describes is to preserve indigenous knowledge and language, which is great, though I think it's still important to raise Pullum's points as a tonic for the exoticism that inevitably arises here, arguably even within the news article.

topaz0 5y ago
Agreed. The Pullum article is one of my favorites.

aerovistae 5y ago

I always found this remarkable until someone pointed out in a book or article somewhere that the same is somewhat true in English for water. We have countless words for water depending on context -- river, ocean, sea, rain, reservoir, stream, brook, mist, wave, deluge, downpour, ice, snow, h20, cloud, fog, dew, hail, brine, precipitation, pond, lake, waterfall, condensation, canal, bay, channel, inlet, gulf, ford, snowflake, pool, waterspout, iceberg, lagoon, flume, spring, estuary, irrigation -- technically all of these refer to the same substance, just in different forms and places. It's the same in the Inuit language.

m463 5y ago
Hmm... you're right. dry, damp, foggy, misty, drizzle, sprinkles, showers, rain, downpour, deluge, torrent.
azeirah 5y ago
You bring up a good analogy, I feel like it doesn't take away the remarkable feeling for me however! I can only come up with three-ish words for sea-ice. Although I do have many more concepts in my mind Ice, iceberg, floating ice.. The fascinating this is when I learned that what you can communicate influences how you see and experience the world. Language has always fascinated me in that way I do know more _concepts_ for sea ice though! Meters-thick ice plateaus safe to live on for years (where ice bears live and hunt and so on) Watery slushy ice you can easily sail navigate through with a boat. 50-200cm thick ice you can't go through with a small boat, thick enough to walk on. Small ice platforms floating on the water, technically thick enough to stand on but what's the point since it's maybe 2 meters in diameter? There're probably many more types of ice worth having a concept and eventually even a word for. If hunting is important for you, and there's a specific formation/type of ice where sea-lions typically gather, it's great to have a word for that! A lot of a people's culture and a lot of individual's personal experience is embedded in the language they speak.
- taeric 5y ago
  I would hazard it isn't your culture that is /embedded/ in the language, per se. It is more that your experiences are /compressed/ into your language. You save no time by having shortened words for things that you could describe easily enough, if you aren't having to do so on a regular basis. As an easy, for me, example. Consider the manipulation of cards. For most folks, you can flip a card. Rotate a card. Put a card on a table. Put a card in a stack on a table. Put it in a pile on a table. Etc., If you are a gamer, you draw a card, discard, tap, activate, hide, trash, remove, etc.. All have distinct differences that are only signified because they happen so often in a game that it wouldn't make sense not to compress them down. Moving back to ice, I would hazard that there is probably not that many words for "sea-ice" in situations that are not encountered. Would love to know if I am wrong. (e.g., Asteroids made of salt water. Planets of frozen water? I could actually see either of those being in lore, but not sure.)

topaz0 5y ago

Most of the comments here are making perfectly valid points about the whizz-bang "fact" from the title of the post. Note, however, that the actual topic of the article is very different: it's about an effort that was made to preserve native knowledge of sea-ice hunting that is being lost as both the Inupiaq language and the environment that it has long been situated in are fading. It is notably not about counting how many words there are for a particular thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the title was a joking reference to the "great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" that others are referring to here.

kasperni 5y ago

Here is the actual dictionary for those interested [1]. [1] https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/94115/kinikmisigumqan00weya.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/94115/kinik...

patchorang 5y ago

There are dozens of words for snow in American English. If you have ever skied you've probably at least encountered "powder". If you regularly backcountry ski you will have a huge vocabulary to describe snow, snow conditions, and the snowpack. I don't think it's all that surprising that Inuits would have so many words to describe snow, if you spend any amount of in snowy conditions you will too.

tediousdemise 5y ago

I bet they don't have words for sand or coconuts.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Inuit have 50 words for everything. In that language group, there are modifiers that change the word, so what might be a phrase in 'western' languages becomes a word. Nothing to see here folks; move along.

dev_tty01 5y ago

Language is fascinating. I was chatting with a friend from India and used the phrase "time is money." She looked at me with a funny expression and asked how I knew that. I explained the origins and meaning of the phrase and she laughed. She said that in her mother tongue the word for money sounds just like the English word "time." I wonder how many of these localized, regional dialects will be lost over the coming decades.

jjtheblunt 5y ago

reminds me of Smilla's Sense of Snow, where this idea plays a role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film...

oxfordmale 5y ago

It is likely as mythical as the claim that Inuits have more hand hundred words for snow.