What's In A Word?

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What Do You Call...? You Know, That White Stuff. It's On The Tip of My Tongue

How many words for snow do Eskimos have? That depends on how you define "word" (and how you define "Eskimo"). "Eskimo" consists of two languages, Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq. Between these two languages, there are about a dozen distinct roots for the word snow. But these languages are polysynthetic or agglutinative, meaning they form words by combining roots and affixes. So, there are hundreds of different lexemes, or word forms, for snow in Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq.

Now, is there any significance to this? In the 1920s, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf came up with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which proposed that thought and behavior are influenced by vocabulary. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has largely been discredited (although there may be some marginal validity in it).

So, the number of words for snow in the Yupik or Inuit-Inupiaq languages is really as irrelevant as the number in English (snow, sleet, frost, frozen rain, hail, blizzard, flakes, powder, corn...).

In Dispute: Eskimos have some megaboss number of words for snow.

Debunked: ...There's something significant about this.

Documented: ...English does too, and also a large number for liquid water.

References:

• AFU Archive: Eskimo Words for Snow
• Eskimo Words for Snow
• AFU Archive: Even More Eskimo Words for Snow
• AFU Archive: And Yet More Eskimo Words for Snow