DSK wrote:
You know, the Eskimos have over 70 words for snow. I wonder how many
different words for "rain" they have in Seattle.


Reginald P. Smithers III wrote:
Doug,
That is an often repeated urban legend, the number of words always
changes, but the one constant is it is an urban legend

Well, OK, maybe I exaggerate.

Then again, maybe not:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297.html

And here is a revision of the same issue, including comments from a
native Koniaq Eskimo who calls the Straight Dope author a dumb redneck
(amusing in itself, but unfortunately she doesn't say how many words for
snow there are in her language)
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010202.html

Regards
Doug King

http://www.derose.net/steve/guides/snowwords/

So how many already?
Pullum cites several sources on how many words certain Inuit dialects
actually have for snow. The two main ones a

The Dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo Language (C. W.
Schultz-Lorentzen, Copenhagan: Reitzels, 1927) gives just two words:
qanik for snowflakes in the air, and aput for snow on the ground.

The Yup'ik Eskimo Dictionary (Steven A. Jacobson, Fairbanks: University
of Alaska, 1984) has, according to Pullum's colleague Anthony Woodbury,
about 24 if you're very generous. By "very generous", I mean including
words for "stuff for sinking habitually into", "blizzard", "avalanche",
and so on.

So 24 seems to be the outer limit that could be defended, at least for
Yup'ik. Unless there are speakers somewhere who make a living by coining
new snow-words and selling them.... No one seems to have checked on that
possibility.

Oh yeah, does English have any words for snow?
It's only fair to see how many snow-words we can find in English. I
didn't even poke around the OED yet, but even if we skip the inflected
forms (snows, snowed, snowing, snowy, snowness, snew, snewn,... well, we
weren't going to count those anyway), there is still a veritable hail of
terms:

berg, cornice, crevasse, floe, frost, glacier, hail, hardpack,
hoarfrost, ice, iceball, icecap, iceberg, ice field, icicle, powder,
rime, snow, slush, sleet, snowball, snowcap
Not to mention a blizzard of words for the parts of snow and for snow as
a weather condition:

avalanche, blizzard, dusting, flurry, ice crystal, ice storm
And the list snowballs as we notice compound words related to snow
(excluding snow-related objects like snowboards and snowshovels):

snowball, snowbank, snowcapped, snowdrift, snowfall, snowflake,
snowlike, snowman, snowstorm
And let us not forget the storm of words that are spelled with a space
in them: phrases that have (arguably, of course) become lexical items
through frequent and distinctive use:

freezing rain, new-fallen snow, yellow snow, glare ice, purple wax snow
(and a host of others skiers can cite)
I can't imagine I've listed anywhere near all the good candidates, but
already that's 40. Which, by the way, is several more than the generous
estimate for Inuit.

If we were as generous as some are for Eskimo, beyond those we'd add
etiology, construction material, food, weapon, toy, floor, projectile,
sculpture, refrigerator, obstruction (reaching double the total for
Inuit), and probably dozens more. And we haven't even considered any
synonyms for "snow job" (a quick look in a thesaurus reveals over 100),
"snow" on your TV, and being "snowed" under.

And why should we care?
It is the conclusions drawn from this bizarre claim that puzzle me most.
One seemingly popular conclusion takes Whorf (of the "Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis") farther than perhaps even Whorf would go, and suggests that
such differences in vocabulary make cross-language communication
fundamentally impossible, or even make a notion of any underlying
reality (accessible or not) impossible. None of this of course follows.
As Pullum again points out, anyone concerned about a particular subject
has a proportionately detailed vocabulary for it. There is little
surprising or interesting about this, and it doesn't seem to have much
affect on communication, realism, or anything else beyond signalling
that you are (or aren't) an expert on a precise topic:

I have precise words for things others would merely lump together and
call "hypertext links".

In reading a book on knife sharpening, I just discovered formal
terminology for bits of rock, carefully distinguished by diameters from
10 inches down to 0.00015 or so. They're also described here.

Wine tasters have another set of terms, far more detailed than I can use
competently.

....

So if some language(s) did have many words for snow, it should be no
more interesting than these other everyday cases. But if you think about
it, people who live in ever-snowful lands may perhaps care no more about
fine variations of snow, than we in warmer climes care about fine
variations of grass or pavement: anything so constant disappears into
the background and becomes less interesting.