words for snow (reply)

[Jonathan Lighter]

> “These people need to know whether ice is fit to walk on or whether you
will sink through it,” says linguist Willem de Reuse at the University of
North Texas. “It’s a matter of life or death.”

So unless you speak Yupik or Inuit, you're done for.

Lingua fata.

JL


JL


On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 10:37 AM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "David A. Daniel" <dad at POKERWIZ.COM>
> Subject:      Re: words for snow (reply)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >"njirru" is an unmanageable female
> Useful word.
> DAD
>
> Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 1:14 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: words for snow (reply)
>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: words for snow (reply)
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---
>
> See also Pullum's riposte:
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419#more-4419
>
> LH
>
>
> On Jan 6, 2014, at 2:48 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> > Groan!
> >
> > http://goo.gl/a7iP4
> >> Mentioning his observations in the introduction to his 1911 book
> >> "Handbook of American Indian Languages," he ignited the claim that
> >> Eskimos have dozens, or even hundreds, of words for snow. Although the
> >> idea continues to capture public imagination, most linguists
> >> considered it an urban legend, born of sloppy scholarship and
> >> journalistic exaggeration. Some have even gone as far as to name it
> >> the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. The latest evidence, however,
> >> suggests that Boas was right all along.
> >> ...
> >> For many of these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is
> >> even richer.
> >> ...
> >> The Sami also have as many as 1,000 words for reindeer. These refer to
> >> such things as the reindeer's fitness ("leami" means a short, fat
> >> female reindeer), personality ("njirru" is an unmanageable female) and
> >> the shape of its antlers ("snarri" is a reindeer whose antlers are
> >> short and branched). There is even a Sami word to describe a bull with
> >> a single, very large testicle: "busat."
> >
> > VS-)
> >
>
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