> Eskimo-Aleut has 50 (?) words for different forms of snow This one is actually a very good example of the problem that OP is describing of non-linguists writ

> Eskimo-Aleut has 50 (?) words for different forms of snow This one is actually a very good example of the problem that OP is describing of non-linguists writing linguistics pieces. The "50 words for snow" story is one of the first linguistics cautionary tales they'll teach you in a college linguistics course these days, on the same level as the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse is for engineering. The short of it is that it's based on a misunderstanding of the word "word". English is a very analytic language [0] on the scale of things, meaning it doesn't tend to augment its words to create new meanings. Instead we add adjectives and adverbs and prepositions to adjust a word's meaning. Inuit languages, meanwhile, are highly agglutinative [0], meaning instead of independent adjectives they attach morphemes (meaningful-chunks-of-speech, think prefixes and suffixes) to the word itself to alter its meaning. That's not really the same thing as having X words for Y, because the words are constructed from parts that have their own, independent meaning—these morphemes are essentially a set of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions that happen to get attached to a word instead of just placed nearby. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language