Stating the obvious
Back in January I wrote an article on the Eskimo and the BBC website has finally caught up with me and done the same. Apparently, the Eskimo have 37 words for snow. Unsurprising when you think about how much of it they have and the preeminence of this substance in their lives. Less known is that they have no word for beer, for which we, in England are blessed with thousands of words. No wonder then that while they invented ice fishing, we invented the worldwide web that has enabled us to order a curry online and a couple of bottles of Kingfisher to wash it down.
6 comments:
Wonderful, funny, and enlightening ideas you have!!
Why thank you Caroline!
You should Google the eskimo and snow thing jason, it's a bit of an urban myth.
And where have you been for the last few months?
Hi Tom,
Actually it's not an urban myth, you should click on the link in this article to the interactive IñupiaQ dictionary and type in snow then count how many words there are.
Life is good, back in London, missing, everywhere else.
jase
Jase,
There are at the most 20 or 21 words on that list that could be used to describe snow as it also includes snow hares, birds with Snow in their name and snowshoes etc and a few alternative spellings of the same word.
So your original point was that it's an urban myth, Eskimos having 37 words for snow, it's actually 20 to 21 - ish in that particular language?
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