7 ms·
Flake, avalanche, snow, zastrugi, powder, firn, dump, pillow, iceberg, chop, snowball, flurry, yukimarimo, piste, ice, snirt, corn, blizzard, cornice, drift, fr
by hannasanarion 1y ago
Flake, avalanche, snow, zastrugi, powder, firn, dump, pillow, iceberg, chop, snowball, flurry, yukimarimo, piste, ice, snirt, corn, blizzard, cornice, drift, freshie, smud, penitentes, frost, hardpack, slurry, berm, chowder, hoar, icicle, neve, slush, styrofoam, glacier, sleet, graupel, crust, crud, dendrites
I heard the Eskimos have over 50 words for a bad example
^ my favorite t-shirt.
So many of these studies also abuse compound words and misunderstand agglutination to produce their shocking counts.
- sudobash1 1y agoA claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love. If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more. Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.
- Der_Einzige 1y ago[flagged]
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThis seems like a really funny concept to me, that any language should be pure. How many millennia do we need to go back for purity? What is untainted English? Only words from the Angles?
- ToValueFunfetti 1y agoYou may find Anglish amusing, then: https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoWell, that wordbook is mighty bewitching.
- Enginerrrd 1y agoWhat's funny is my initial impression of Anglish is that it reminds me a lot of German.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoGiven English's "pure" roots, that should probably be entirely unsurprising.
- sorokod 1y agoNot surprising, it is a Germanic language. West Germanic, Anglo Frisian to be precise. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages
- ch4s3 1y agoEvery language in contact with other languages borrows words. Many of the French words in English come from Gaulish, for example bard. In tun there are also many Celtic words from before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain that are preserved. The Franks themselves who later influenced English were Germanic people moving into a formerly Roman-Celtic region who adopted a kind of Latin. Further confusing this, the Anglo-Saxons spoke a language that that was carrying some words from West Baltic languages like the word for awl. The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.
- Tor3 1y ago> The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous. Agreed. French, of course, is 100% impure if we're supposed to think that way.. it didn't exist a dozen centuries or so ago, all its words are from Latin and regional languages, and so on. And of course other languages are like that too.
- ch4s3 1y agoRight. Even Latin had a lot of Etruscan vocabulary and used the Etruscan alphabet.
- ted_dunning 1y agoWhich was a bastardization of Greek and Phoenician.
- ch4s3 1y agoDo you mean the alphabet? Because Etruscan is not related to Greek, and Phoenician was a Semitic language.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- weregiraffe 1y ago
- lupusreal 1y agoIs your language pure? The word for pineapples is ananas in just about every language besides English.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoDon't come at me unless you're speaking the original proto-Indo-European.
- alwa 1y agoWhen I try to interpret this generously, I wonder if you’re suggesting that the Inuit languages in question would be less prone to crossover with other languages? I wonder how much linguistic distance there is between Inuit languages in the region as compared to, say, Romance languages in Western Europe.
- yongjik 1y agoMight not be that large, depending on which region we're talking about. From what I've heard, Inuit expansion in the arctic is a fairly recent event. Fun fact: Ancestors of the modern Inuit people arrived at Greenland after Vikings did! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> Fun fact: Ancestors of the modern Inuit people arrived at Greenland after Vikings did! The Egyptians left records, and pictures, of the peoples to their south, with whom they engaged variously in diplomacy, trade, and military conflict. Those peoples are now extinct, with more recent arrivals occupying their land.
- Suppafly 1y ago>A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love. A lot of that is because we use multi-word phrases instead of single words to express a lot of ideas too. Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. Often we have a word but the other person just isn't familiar with it and assumes it doesn't exist, or assumes it's not known because it was borrowed into English.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. The Romans believed that philosophy had to be done in Greek because Latin wasn't suited to the field. There is a speech (letter?) by Cicero railing against the belief, in which he demonstrates that it's possible and in fact easy to use Latin for all of the concepts that are supposed to be restricted to Greek. Apparently nobody learned anything from this.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago> Apparently nobody learned anything from this. Is it because he wrote it in latin?
- psychoslave 1y agoEnglish yet had to be invented, and in term of life span for egemony over western intellectual linguistic expression, Latin probably is still on the top of the podium by a large margin. And of course many proeminent figures in philosophy expressed their major works in Latin.
- zeroonetwothree 1y ago
- o11c 1y agoA related annoyance is when people expect words in other languages to have exactly one clear (if not necessarily narrow) meaning (or spelling, pronunciation, etc.), even though English doesn't. Other languages, especially languages that people actually used and that interacted with many other languages, are every bit as prone to complication as English.
- adityaathalye 1y agoAncient or modern, masterful lyrical expression of love is the domain of the cunning linguist.
- bunderbunder 1y agoAlso human subjectivity makes it kind of impossible to do this sort analysis in a systematic way that yields an apples-to-apples comparison. How do you properly account for slang or figurative language in a way that works consistently across languages when every dictionary you might use is maintained by a different group of people with different editorial standards? And then, yes, agglutination. What's way more interesting to me than how many words Inuktitut or Chinese have for snow is the way the very structure of these languages illustrates how ill-defined a concept "word" is in the first place. You might think you know what it means in English, and that might transfer reasonably well to other Indo-European languages, but as you go further afield you start to see more and more examples where the concept needs heavy modification to remain useful.
- rightbyte 1y agoI like you t-shirt but I am kinda disappointed the list is 39 words but I guess it conveys the point.
- harimau777 1y agoIt feels like maybe that t-shirt misses the point. For example, "avalanche" is not a word for snow. It's a word for a specific event involving snow. Having a word that meant "snow that is likely to cause an avalanche" actually would be a useful concept that isn't present in English.
- ted_dunning 1y agoSlab. Depth hoar. Slush. Cornice.
- ted_dunning 1y agoYou forgot haily puckles!