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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 indust

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.
jcranmer 5y ago
At a first glance, a lot of the words for "ice" here are referring to specific kinds of landforms. English landform words for a particular kind include: mountain, mount, peak, hill, ridge, crest, rock, mesa, knob, butte, table, dome, mound. Another kind of landform is a river, brook, creek, flume, gully, gorge, stream, channel. Or maybe you're taking about a swamp, marsh, fen, moorland, bog, slough? And I'm not even getting to the technical terms here.

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.

jcranmer 5y ago

At a first glance, a lot of the words for "ice" here are referring to specific kinds of landforms. English landform words for a particular kind include: mountain, mount, peak, hill, ridge, crest, rock, mesa, knob, butte, table, dome, mound. Another kind of landform is a river, brook, creek, flume, gully, gorge, stream, channel. Or maybe you're taking about a swamp, marsh, fen, moorland, bog, slough? And I'm not even getting to the technical terms here.