"for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term."

From my perspective this is the hoax. I come from the alps and we have dozens of terms for snow. Only those people without snow might have one word, because they have no need to describe different versions of snow. I remember Sulz, Firn, Neu, Kunst, Matsch, Harsch, Papp, Pulver, ... (left 35 years ago).

This is still Pappschnee, Neuschnee, Pulverschnee, etc.

Yes and no.

No because, Firn and Harsch are words on their own.

Yes, because of the way the German language works. It tends to create new words by combining old words not by creating new short words (Dialects like Bavarian work differently though, they often tend to create new words).

Then after centuries people forget that and think it's one word. Like "Enttäuschung" (disappointment) which people no longer realize what the two words are and that "Enttäuschung" really means that you had been deceived ("Täuschung") and now are not longer - the deeper meaning of "Enttäuschung" in German. Same for "Werkzeug" (Tool) - the words get their own identity.

Blötsnö, nysnö, pulversnö. I can make up new ones too: lastbilssnö (truck snow). With agglutenative languages counting words doesn't work.

The hoax is the interpretation that the language you speak has a significant impact on how you can think. This article seems to argue it's the inverse relationship, which is not nearly as controversial.

English-speaking skiers have more words for "snow" than Inuktitut-speakers. It's the culture that shapes the language, not the language that shapes the mind.

English tends to have unique words for everything. Basically every difference gets its own word. Jump, hop, skip describe similar movements, but the words are not related in any way. A different language would use a common noun and add an adjective.

Now, this does affect how you think. We need different words (including multi-word combinations) to point to different things. But we also need to see similarities between things and this is how we choose the form for these words or word combinations.

To rewrite a problem in different and more generic terms is a know heuristic to get a better understanding of it and maybe gain an insight. (Note that more generic terms mean that you start using more multi-word combinations and will see both differences and similarities.)

A different metaphor may also open up different possibilities. E.g we are trying to model a permission system and phrase it in terms of users, groups, and resources. We may come up with a different solution if we switch to users, keys, and rooms. Entities in the model are neither groups nor keys; they have their own nature we try to imperfectly capture with words pointing to things that have a superficially same relationship. The words are not quite good; but we need some pointers.

This is why trying to find the perfect name for a variable is a fallacy. There are no perfect names. What helps more are names that are different in one way and similar in another and form a consistent set.

I’d argue both shape each other.

Portuguese is an example of this - there was a deliberate narrowing of the lexicon in the 20th century, even extending to losing certain tenses like the future perfect, and this has resulted in a narrowing of the field of expression.

For example, in English you can say “by next week, I will have finished the work”, but in Portuguese you boil it down to the simple perfect, and it becomes unclear as to whether you have already done the work or not.

You also just literally can’t translate stuff like “she must have been going to go” or “she would have had to have gone” or “I will have been living here for five years in two weeks”.

This results in a loss of temporal thinking, hypothetical chains, and allocations of causality and responsibility, and while I don’t at all wish to besmirch the good Portuguese people, the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.

Or maybe it’s just a hangover from Salazar and I’m barking up the wrong tree, but often when I’ve attempted clarification on this stuff the distinction has just not been comprehensible to my interlocutor. I try to use stuff like the future perfect (as it still theoretically exists, but is almost entirely disused) and people just do not understand - either the structure or the concept.

Chinese doesn't have tense at all. That's why China has been utterly unable to plan anything over the past 30 years whereas the United States with their nicely tensed language has deftly planned and organised lots of infrastructure for the future.

China has not really a good track record in terms of planning, especially when it's time related. They plan and build too much and end up with unused ruins, or even infrastructure which breaks down on the first whim. Of course this is not because of language, but in this context here it's a funny twist.

What do you mean? Their relationship is always tense.

Oddly, standard Mandarin does have tense, but it only shows up in negative sentences. You have to negate verbs differently in the past tense. An English speaker will feel right at home with which negation to use when.

Indo-European languages tend to have a subjunctive mood, and while it's nearly gone in English, we still have the robust distinction between real and unreal situations that mood reflects. This is much hazier in Chinese; it's hard (for an English speaker, and I assume any Indo-European speaker) not to notice that Chinese sentences often don't bother to make a distinction.

wonderful rebuttal

> the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.

Source: trust me bro.

History books are littered with authors trying to explain that their language/culture is superior and the source of their society's success. They _never_ establish a connection besides a few examples like you did, a lot of handwaving, and the fact that their society is currently thriving.

"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."

This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.

Indeed, I looked at some highly scored words for Polish in google translate and they are words where the foreign word, transliterations into Polish, and Polish word are used. And when you pare it down to say five real distinctive meanings, you often find similar less commonly used synonyms in English. Also as I was looking through it seemed that possibly it was not taking into consideration verb vs. noun in English cause the counts seemed oddly way off for some where it could have happened. If you are familiar with English and another language, I would like to know what you see.

Yeah, lots of fun data issues can be found in their exploration tool https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html

Icelandic has a bunch of dictionary abbrevations: medic(al), temp(us), germ(anic), veg(etation). Tarifit is dominated by linguistic terminology. German has a few German words that look like English words meaning something completely different (mantel, tier, boot, stall), one loanword (angst) and what might be dictionary abbrevations again: humor(ous), miner(alogy), spa(nish)...

I happened to write my bachelors thesis on the effect of mother-tongues on cognitive processes in 2012 and found the literature very vague on this issue.

At the time the literature suggested that the cognitive processes are the same across populations of different mother-tongues but that language can influence the data those processes work upon, EG: exposed to the same events, what details get picked up, built into narratives and remembered.

I would move that language constitutes a very strong mnemonic anchor if nothing else.

Do you know of any research into bilingual people and the effect of switching languages? I feel like I become an almost different person if I switch back to speaking Dutch for more than a day.

I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I've had some basic exposure to a few other languages. I've found when travelling that trying to struggle by in another country's language (avoiding English) is almost like reformatting my brain. It takes a few days to to reach the point where my surface thoughts are in the new language, but at the same time, my knowledge of the new language is so primitive that those thoughts can't have any complexity. I've wondered if that's anything like the mind-emptiness that Zen meditators are known to seek. Of course I could switch back to English when I had to.

I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.

Maybe study a bit of ancient Greek or Latin to boost your English a little.

I would be interested in reading that.

I was participant in an fMRI study (done as PhD work by a computational linguist) that contrasted native speakers of German and Polish, showing that phonemes that exist in your native tongue are processed in different areas of your brain than phonemes that are non-native to you.

The British have umpteen ways to describe rain storms/showers. Drizzle, deluge, mizzle, pouring, bucketing, lashing, and quite a few words for wind. Speaking of which the wind, which is the major feature of the weather in Arab countries... has given rise to umpteen different words for explaining what kind of wind they are experiencing, some of which don't really have an English translation. The "proof" was always right there in front of them.

So, the Innuit may not have 100 words for "snow" after all. But the Hacker's Dictionary really does contain 216 synonyms for "broken".

[*] https://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html

Boas claimed in 1884 that the Inuit language on Baffin Island had four words for snow. The "100" was inflated through re-telling. And that number has been thoroughly refuted. Of course. Inuit languages don't have 100 different roots for snow. As for "four".. well, English has several too (snow, sleet, slush, firn..), and most other languages from regions where snow exists have a number of such words. Nothing new there.

They have a few.

Aput: Snow on the ground. Qana: Falling snow. Piqsirpoq: Drifting snow. Kaniq: Frost. Kanevvluk: Fine snow. Muruaneq: Soft deep snow. Nutaryuk: Fresh snow. Pirta: Blizzard. Qengaruk: Snow bank.

Not arguing against the idea that the Inuit have many more words for snow. But in english their are many commonly understood equivalents. Even more if you're into the snow sport scene that may reach Inuit levels.

Common words off the top of my head:

Snow on the ground: Snowpack, hardpack, powder, crust, crud, piste

Falling snow: snowing, sleet, blizzard, snowstorm.

Drifting snow: snowdrift.

Frost: frost.

Modern scene lingo Pow, corduroy, granular, chunder, cornice etc

A linguistic sub group of English that literally immerses itself in snow also having many words for snow makes sense.

To be fair to the Inuit language, they never rode groomers.

Graupel

Don't forget sastrugi.

A climbing partner and I counted over 60 words for snow in (our idiosyncratic) English.

So, I guess there Inuit, English speakers and mountaineers as three different populations.

I think Finnish also has quite many.

Looks like an older version (4.3.0) of The Jargon File page I'm aware of (4.4.7): http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/

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.

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.

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.

>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.

The single-word for the concept of 'brotherly love' in english is 'camaraderie' in traditional usage or 'bromance' in colloquial American english.

> 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.

> Apparently nobody learned anything from this.

Is it because he wrote it in latin?

A 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.

Ancient or modern, masterful lyrical expression of love is the domain of the cunning linguist.

This 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?

You may find Anglish amusing, then:

https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish

What's funny is my initial impression of Anglish is that it reminds me a lot of German.

Not surprising, it is a Germanic language.

West Germanic, Anglo Frisian to be precise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages

Given English's "pure" roots, that should probably be entirely unsurprising.

Well, that wordbook is mighty bewitching.

Every 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.

  > 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.

Right. Even Latin had a lot of Etruscan vocabulary and used the Etruscan alphabet.

Which was a bastardization of Greek and Phoenician.

>The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.

Klingon and Sindarin are 100% pure.

When 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.

Might 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

> 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.

Is your language pure? The word for pineapples is ananas in just about every language besides English.

Don't come at me unless you're speaking the original proto-Indo-European.

Also 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.

You forgot haily puckles!

It 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.

Slab. Depth hoar. Slush. Cornice.

I like you t-shirt but I am kinda disappointed the list is 39 words but I guess it conveys the point.

The data exploration tool linked-to from the article:

https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html

Why does the tool say that "cable" is the lexically most elaborated word in French?

in a polysynthetic language like inuit, "words" aren't really a useful category to measure. i'd hedge my bets the amount of words for snow approaches infinity. do they perhaps mean "roots"?

The technical claim about Inuit is indeed about roots, not words.

One way to improve the rigor of this research would be to embed each word in each language in a common latent space then look for clusters.

But creating that latent space and the corresponding embedding algorithm is hard in the first place. Today’s embedding models could be terrible for the fringe languages this research is about, and we wouldn’t know because we don’t know how to evaluate overall semantic accuracy.

Am I off piste here?

This is somewhat similar to the language vector embedding, isn't it?

And the article asks the reasonable question "what is the difference between having a single word for a thing versus a commonly understood cluster of words?". It's not a hard boundary.

Every translation loses a little bit of information but potentially brings in different connotations. The things that translators and localizers argue about endlessly: do we look for the words that most closely match the other words, or do we look for feeling and meaning that most closely matches the original intent?

I can’t find the actual words. I’d like to see the four french synonyms for abandonment that they counted.

Seeing the maps was interesting. Pretty sure there are like 2 dozen words for weed…

There are about a dozen types of snow. It’s quite reasonable for people who care about the difference to be able to describe them in language. Anyone who has shoveled snow can tell you there’s a difference between a cold light snow and a heavy wet snow. Anyone who has walked on snow crust can recall the feeling.

Ask anyone who skis what his favorite type of snow is. His least favorite: Champaign powder, fat wet flakes, cold fluff, icy crust, I could probably talk for an hour about the different types of snow and the conditions that lead to them. Some types of snow lead to avalanche conditions. Some are dangerous to drive in. Some are a dream to ski, some make you turn around and go home.

Maybe we don’t have singular words for it, but we certainly can describe the differences in language. It would be insane to think otherwise.

I don't think anyone ever posited that it's impossible to describe the differences. Only that some languages optimize for things that they encounter regularly.

With respect to snow and snow-related things, I actually ran into this personally. That thick icy crust on snow that you've described in your comment - it has a dedicated word for it in Russian, наст (nast). It never occurred to me that there isn't an equivalent single word for that in English in 20 years of living in English-speaking countries because it simply doesn't occur in the areas where I live. Until, one day, it did, and I realized that I have to explain-translate it.

(Some other languages that have a dedicated word for that are Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian)

> That thick icy crust on snow that you've described in your comment - it has a dedicated word for it in Russian, наст (nast)

In Norwegian and Swedish the word is "skare". If I were to translate it to English, I'd just translate it to crust, but it has a similar etymology to English "shear".

Szreń is a modern construct, unlike in Russian:

https://nck.pl/projekty-kulturalne/projekty/ojczysty-dodaj-d...

Interesting, thank you! I take it this meaning entered the vernacular from weather reports on TV and such?

when discussing the Inuit, or way up far north people, it is important to recognise there many indipendently invented technologys, and the language to go with them. I was very surprised one day to encounter snow that would in fact be suitable to cut into blocks and used structuraly.It is not like any other snow and is composed of a wind blown deposit, but I suspect that the exaxt conditions for the creation and bonding of the particles are rare @ the 45th paralell where I live. As to language comanalities and roots, ya sure whatever, it is clear that language is inate, and there are endless spontainious dialects and outright new languages poping up, and at ond point someone had a list of actual languages that had less speakers than klingon. And generational and class cultural boundry's demand some way to keep secrets and invent ways to create a comunication system that allows for planning a friday night after work shindig, blow the roof off, but you still want to sit and chat with grandma.....so

I am reminded of the humorous quote from Douglas Adams' novel "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish":

Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.

It's funny but makes a decent argument for the same thing you are. Seems perfectly natural to me.

(Also, any excuse to quote Douglas Adams is worth it...)

i can come up with more than 50 words for snow in english without problem. While some of the types you name don't get a word in english many others do.

Skiers also have many words for snow: powder, slush, corn, corduroy, crust, ice (not ice), blue ice (actually ice), windpack, popcorn (unrelated to "corn"), and of course the California favorite: cement.

dust on crust, firn, mashed potatoes (with or without gravy), graupel, chowder, crud, packed powder, blower pow, chop, fluff, smoke, ...

So someone named Geoff Pullum called this a hoax. Now that claim may be wrong. Did the journalist find some explanation of why Pullum said that? I'm curious.

Here is his essay, if you’re wondering! It’s short and zippy and pretty fun—has the flavor of that slightly smug, sarcastic, sassy contrarianism of the New Atheists’ writing in that time—

https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pd...

> What i do here is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986. Laura Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Cleveland State University. She endures calmly the fact that virtually no one listened to her when she first published. It may be that few will listen to me as I explain in different words to another audience what she pointed out. But the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said they do. Anyone who insists on simply checking their primary sources will find that they are quite unable to document the alleged facts about snow vocabulary (but nobody ever checks, because the truth might not be what the reading public wants to hear).

Also worth noting that Pullum is a well-known linguist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_K._Pullum

(and there is a Wikipedia page for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)

Linked from the article: https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pd...

Article title:

> Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’

Abstract from the cited paper [0]:

> our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce non-obvious and well-grounded insights about language and culture.

I think I'll continue to be sceptical of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

[0] https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2

Since this parent post is getting downvoted, maybe I should have elaborated: the claims in the title of this article ("proof of X") seem to be a lot stronger than the actual research paper it references ("suggests that X").

This subject is something that has been discussed for over a century (to be honest I'm not sure how much it's been considered seriously by linguists in recent years, but hey, I remember it being brought up back in LING201).

The title of the article just seems a bit extreme to me, as if the debate around linguistic relativity is over now that someone ran a counter over some bilingual dictionaries. It's an interesting approach, and maybe it can give some direction into where to look, but I think we'd need a lot more than numerical analysis on dictionaries to prove something about language, and we need to account for other causes of correlations.

Eg, bilingual dictionaries (which this research analyses) are likely to be compiled by people who are aware of these claims about their language. If you're creating a dictionary for a language that is known for having "X words for snow", you'll put more effort into listing many words for snow than many words for taste. Note that bilingual dictionaries often exist for language learning purposes, so they intentionally won't paint a complete picture of the language.