How many words do Eskimos have for snow? Detailed answer

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How many words do Eskimos have for snow? Detailed answer

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How many words do Eskimos have for snow?

No more than four.

It is often said that the Eskimos have 50, 100 or even 400 words for the concept of "snow", as opposed to the one and only English snow, but this is not true. Let's start with the fact that in English for the concept of "snow" in its various states there is far from one word (ice, slush, crust, sleet, hail, snowflakes, powder (Ice, slush, crust, groats, hail, flakes, powder. ) etc.). Most Eskimo groups recognize only two words equivalent to our "snow". It seems that in all Eskimo languages there are no more than four root words for snow.

The Eskimo-Aleut languages are agglutinative (or polysynthetic), where the word "word" itself, in essence, means nothing. Adjective and verb morphemes are added to vocabulary stems in a chain, so that many of their "word groups" are rather equivalent to our sentences. For example, tikit-qaag-mina-it-ni-ga-a in Inyupiak means "he (a) said that he (a) could not come first" (literally "to come first he could not tell him ").

The number of vocabulary bases is relatively small, but the possibilities for their definition are practically unlimited. Inuit has over 400 affixes (morphemes added at the end or in the middle of stems), but only one prefix. Thus, a set of "derivative words" is obtained.

Sometimes these "derivatives" seem to be unnecessarily complicated interpretations of concepts that are elementary for us Englishmen. Thus, nalunaar-asuar-ta-at ("what is usually used to communicate in a hurry") is an 1880s Greenlandic neologism meaning the most common "telegraph".

If we take a broader view and not get hung up on "words for snow", we will see what really distinguishes the Eskimo-Aleut languages from all others - demonstrative pronouns.

There are only four of them in English (this, that, these and those - this, that, these and those). The Eskimo-Aleut family of languages—especially Inyupiaq, Yupik, and Aleut—has over thirty of them. Each of the words meaning "this" or "that" can be in eight different cases, and the abundance of ways to express distance, direction, height, visibility, and context with one such demonstrative pronoun is simply amazing.

For example, in Aleutian hakan means "what is there, high above" (as in the case of a bird in the air), qakun means "what is there, inside" (as in another room), and utak means "that which is not seen" (that is, heard, smelled, felt).

Author: John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

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