Inuits have hundreds of words for sea ice (2013)

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.

As a counterpoint from a linguist, everyone who&#x27;s intrigued by this or the (nearly a century old!) &quot;Eskimos have 100 words for snow&quot; trope should read Geoff Pullum&#x27;s &quot;The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax&quot;[0]:<p>&quot;The tale [...] is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people&#x27;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.&quot;<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>&quot;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&#x27;s Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: &quot;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...&quot; (p. 137). Imagine reading: &quot;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...&quot; 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.&quot;<p>&quot;The final words of Laura Martin&#x27;s paper are about her hope that we can come to see the Eskimo snow story as a cautionary tale reminding us of &quot;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.&quot;&quot;<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lel.ed.ac.uk&#x2F;~gpullum&#x2F;EskimoHoax.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lel.ed.ac.uk&#x2F;~gpullum&#x2F;EskimoHoax.pdf</a><p>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&#x27;s still important to raise Pullum&#x27;s points as a tonic for the exoticism that inevitably arises here, arguably even within the news article.

Most of the comments here are making perfectly valid points about the whizz-bang &quot;fact&quot; from the title of the post. Note, however, that the actual topic of the article is very different: it&#x27;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&#x27;t be surprised if the title was a joking reference to the &quot;great Eskimo vocabulary hoax&quot; that others are referring to here.

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.<p>You can think of the &quot;ice&quot; and all of its &quot;parts&quot; important for those that spend much of their livelihood on and around it. If you&#x27;re hunting or in a life or death situation in this environment, you&#x27;ll want to be concise with your communication.

Here is the actual dictionary for those interested [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;repository.si.edu&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;handle&#x2F;10088&#x2F;94115&#x2F;kinikmisigumqan00weya.pdf?sequence=1&amp;isAllowed=y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;repository.si.edu&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;handle&#x2F;10088&#x2F;94115&#x2F;kinik...</a>

There are dozens of words for snow in American English. If you have ever skied you&#x27;ve probably at least encountered &quot;powder&quot;. If you regularly backcountry ski you will have a huge vocabulary to describe snow, snow conditions, and the snowpack.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;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.

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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Most_common_words_in_English" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Most_common_words_in_English</a><p>&gt; According to The Reading Teacher&#x27;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.

Language is fascinating. I was chatting with a friend from India and used the phrase &quot;time is money.&quot; 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 &quot;time.&quot;<p>I wonder how many of these localized, regional dialects will be lost over the coming decades.

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&#x27;s office counting the holes in the acoustic tiles?

Inuit have 50 words for everything. In that language group, there are modifiers that change the word, so what might be a phrase in &#x27;western&#x27; languages becomes a word.<p>Nothing to see here folks; move along.

reminds me of Smilla&#x27;s Sense of Snow, where this idea plays a role.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film...</a>

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

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).<p>I didn&#x27;t think on it long, but only came up a few things: sex, genitalia, faeces and cannabis.

I bet they don&#x27;t have words for sand or coconuts.