Luke Maciak wrote:

Inuit languages don’t actually seem to have an exceptional number of words and idioms relating to snow. It follows that they are not that particularly interested in snow. It’s part of their life, but they don’t have some special relationship with it.

But…, my point was precisely that you cannot base that conclusion on just the premise that Eskimo languages do not have an exceptional number of words and idioms relating to snow. I mean, Eskimos could be better at communicating about snow without unique words. We rarely use e.g. ‘soft snow’ or ‘semi-soft snow’ to describe the weather, but we still have the words to express that in our language, so if you are just counting word-for-word it wouldn’t count. The crucial question is how often we use expressions like this vs. how often Eskimos do.

@ Tino:

No, I don’t think it’s supposed to be taken literally. I think it is supposed to be taken just the way you described it. And apparently it is not true. Inuit languages don’t actually seem to have an exceptional number of words and idioms relating to snow. It follows that they are not that particularly interested in snow. It’s part of their life, but they don’t have some special relationship with it.

Programmers have hundreds of names for crashes because it is their profession. We need these names because they help us differentiate between all different types of crashes. It’s part of our job to name and define these things. There is just a weather phenomenon, and so there is no need to study it in such depth. It’s just something you deal with.

Of course IANAE so I might be wrong here.

Sorry for replying to myself, but to sort the question of Eskimos and snow out for real, someone should do the xkcd man-women color test:
http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
but, instead of colors, use different photos of snowy landscapes and bin the results in Eskimos vs. non-Eskimos.

About the “Eskimos have about a hundred different words for snow”. Does this saying have to be interpreted so literally? I have always understood it more to mean that Eskimos are aware of many more different types of snow, snow conditions, etc., and that they are much more capable of expressing these in language than people less concerned with snow. I would expect this to be true. Just as computer programmers in a sense have “a hundred different words for software crashes” even though they are not single unique words as such, e.g., buffer overflow, out of stack, core dump, crash to desktop, blue screen of death, etc.

I think the word Pineapple must be derived from the fact that the fruit looks a little like a pine cone. Albeit large and yellow.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Interesting. In Polish the cell phone is komurka which incidentally is also the word we use for a biological cell. Not prison cell though – that’s cela więzienna.

Funny thing is that Polish tends to absorb foreign words quite readily. Words like “hot dogi, hamburgery, czipsy (chips) are common place. Lately I’ve been hearing Polish TV presenters using phrase w realu when they mean IRL because Polish does not have an equivalent idiom but it drives me absolutely nuts. IMHO it sounds retarded.

@ Liudvikas:

Random linguistic factoid dump. I really didn’t have any point. I just sat down and started typing. The rest is just verbal diarrhea. Sorry. :(

@ Steve:

Yep, that too!

@ Gui13:

Interesting. What do you use for motor bikes? In Polish it is coincidentally motocykl (there is that cycle root) or motor.

Amateur cyclist is rowerzysta but a professional cyclist (one who participates in bicycle races) is kolaż (derived from koło which is wheel – so roughly you could translate it as “wheeler”).

@ Nathan:

Heh! I’m not surprised though. I would expect there to be a disconnect between the closely related Western European languages, and Asian languages just because of the geographical distances and their impact in the times when these languages were just forming.

@ jambarama:

Yeah, I completely forgot about that one. I’ve seen it on reddit a few times. :) I can’t remember the etymology of the word Pinaple. How the hell did we come up with that?

@ kuzux:

Interesting. Polish has few dozen curse words equivalent to English word “fuck” and there is no clear preference. And I’m not talking about euphemisms here – those are actual curse words that you would get bleeped out on TV if Poles were as prudish as Americans (we are not, cursing on Polish TV is ok if it is after hours). In fact, it is one of the areas where people can get very inventive.

In fact “fuck” is not the top curse-word. The top one is kurwa which stands for prostitute which is as universal as “fuck” (can be used as non, verb, adjective, punctuation, etc..). But I’m getting off topic here.

Polish actually has a lot of situations where the opposite of you describe is true – same word being re-used in drastically different contexts.

For example the word zamek can mean one of the following:

– a castle
– a door lock
– a zipper (like in your jacket)

@ Gui13:
The exact opposite situation exists in turkish. “Velespit” for the old kind of bike, and “Bisiklet” for the modern one.
Also, in many cases, there are three words that have the same meaning, but of different etymology(arabic,persian,old turkic or french), like “Absürt”(french), “Abes”(arabic), and “Saçma”(Turkish, literally “thrown around”) all mean absurd.

In an unrelated linguistic curiosity, many/most non-East-Asian languages call a pineapple some variant of ananas. English is the exception.

Japanese for bicycle is ‘jitensha’. So…yeah. That happened.

Also, the all-seeing, all-knowing Cecil Adams discusses the whole Eskimo words for snow thing (and a reprise later on).

And…what’s really cool…is there no such things as “Eskimos” in Canada (and Greenland) anymore :) They call themselves “Inuit”. Ain’t language fun.