Snow and updates
Jud and Mike content that when they see "the literature" cited, they think not of a place, but of a very large book containing all the knowledge about one subject in a searchable, easy to read format.
I am beginning to understand why the inuit have so many words for snow. I have observed more than five distinguishable varieties of falling snow and a number of varieties of fallen snow, and I think these types should have names so that long lists of adjectives are unnecessary. I read a lot of Hemmingway during my formative writing years, and, consequently, I like to use descriptive nouns and verbs rather than descriptive modifiers.
The following are types of falling snow I've observed. Flake size ranges from tiny (individual flakes) to large (clumpy).
And now I'm going to be late to class, so I'll go ahead and post this. Later!
I am beginning to understand why the inuit have so many words for snow. I have observed more than five distinguishable varieties of falling snow and a number of varieties of fallen snow, and I think these types should have names so that long lists of adjectives are unnecessary. I read a lot of Hemmingway during my formative writing years, and, consequently, I like to use descriptive nouns and verbs rather than descriptive modifiers.
The following are types of falling snow I've observed. Flake size ranges from tiny (individual flakes) to large (clumpy).
- Slow-falling snow
- Floaty snow
- Fast-falling snow
- Pouring snow
- Powder
- Packed powder
- Granular (Crud)
- Crust
- Slush
And now I'm going to be late to class, so I'll go ahead and post this. Later!
posted by megan at
10:58 AM
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RebeccaP, at 1:24 PM
"The Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow."
This pseudo-factoid has been circulating for years like an e-mail chain letter. People cite it not because they know anything about Eskimo, but because they heard or read it somewhere.
The anthropologist Laura Martin has traced the development of this myth (including the steady growth in the number of words claimed-- in the earliest citations it's just four or seven words). Geoffrey Pullum summarizes her report in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991).
Still, how many words are there?
It depends on what you mean by words. The Eskimo (Inuit and Yup'ik) languages are agglutinative and polysynthetic-- which means that hundreds of words can be formed from any root in the language, not just words meaning 'snow'.
Maybe we should leave all those suffixes out of the picture, and just consider roots and derived words. You'll certainly find hundreds of snow words... but the same is true of English. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 125 compounds of the word 'snow' alone.
Probably the fairest comparison is to look at roots. The Yup'ik language in particular has about two dozen roots describing snow or things related to snow. But then English has quite a few itself: snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, flurry, avalanche, powder, drift, firn, poudre, etc. Some of these have non-snow-related meanings; but then so do some of the Yup'ik words.
(Language Myths, Bauer and Trudgill, 1999)
For fun:
http://www.mendosa.com/snow.html
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RebeccaP, at 1:27 PM
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