Snowman or snowwoman?

[Florian Siegl]

Kazuto - a very appropriate question on the Northern Hemisphere on a 
cold but sunny Sunday in the end of January (even when there is no snow 
in Tokyo).  Here in Tartu (Estonia), it is -23C and we have a lot of 
snow and one finds 'snow grannies' all over town.

E.g. Russian from the which the Estonian 'snow granny' seems to be 
borrowed: /snezhnaja baba/ 'снежная баба'. Russian has also /snegovik 
/снеговик for 'snowman' but I think that snezhnaja baba is more common 
in colloquial Russian, but I'm not a native speaker of Russian...

Finnish is slightly pejorative too, but has 'snow old.man' /lumi_ukko 
/which seems to have come via Swedish /snö_gubbe/' snow old.man'. 
English /snowman/ and German /Schneemann/ are at least neutral as 'man' 
is not further specified. Hungarian shows a third kind of 'unisex' 
solution as /hó_ember /could be translated as either 'snow person' or 
'snow man', depending on individual preferences. It would be interesting 
to see how Russian 'snow granny' would turn up in other languages of 
Russia, but I'm afraid that such a word is not listed in the usual 
dictionaries. For Udmurt (Permic-Uralic), I found lymy_adjami лымыадями 
in a recent dictionary which means either 'snow person' or 'snow man', 
again, depending on one's preferred translation. Other dictionaries 
(whether those of Turkic or Uralic languages) I have at home had no 
entry for this. The only exception is Dolgan, but the phrasal 
construction 'an old woman made out of snow' makes me believe that this 
is not spoken Dolgan.

A question which looks equally interesting are equivalents of German 
/Schneeballschlacht /'snowball fight' - any languages out there which 
have a more peaceful solution?

Cheers, Florian Siegl

Univeristy of Tartu



Kazuto Matsumura wrote:
> Just for fun. Which is the 'default' gender of a figure of a person made 
> from packed snow in your native language? For a majority of colleagues, 
> the answer is 'male', I presume.
>
> I've noticed it's 'female' for the Estonian colleagues: lumememm 'snow 
> granny'. What other languages are feminist in this respect?
>
> Incidentally, it's sunny today and there's absolutely no snow around 
> here in Tokyo.
>
> Best,
> Kazuto
>
> --
> Kazuto Matsumura
> kazuto.matsumura(a)nifty.com
> http://www.kmatsum.info
>