According to the show QI, it's a commonly held fallacy that Inuit languages have 100 (or whatever the claim is) words for snow.
What speakers of these languages do have in their linguistic toolkit is a plethora of demonstratives, a grammatical area sadly sparse in English - this, that, these and those. That (ha!) is not the topic of this post, however: please research this interesting usage of demonstratives in Inuit languages elsewhere.
English, in fact, has plenty of words for snow and for describing snow: snow falls, it dumps, it comes in the form of sleet, hail, in a blizzard, in powder and in slush. This week a new member of the lexical family came to my attention as it fell in Auckland: graupel. This is the form between snow and sleet and has been bothering Kiwis in this, an Arctic winter by Antipodean standards.
Have a look here for more information about graupel. It sounds very menacing and reminds me of my favourite Russian word, grom, whose rather wonderful onomatopoeia reveals its meaning: thunder.
Weather words are great, aren't they?
What speakers of these languages do have in their linguistic toolkit is a plethora of demonstratives, a grammatical area sadly sparse in English - this, that, these and those. That (ha!) is not the topic of this post, however: please research this interesting usage of demonstratives in Inuit languages elsewhere.
English, in fact, has plenty of words for snow and for describing snow: snow falls, it dumps, it comes in the form of sleet, hail, in a blizzard, in powder and in slush. This week a new member of the lexical family came to my attention as it fell in Auckland: graupel. This is the form between snow and sleet and has been bothering Kiwis in this, an Arctic winter by Antipodean standards.
Have a look here for more information about graupel. It sounds very menacing and reminds me of my favourite Russian word, grom, whose rather wonderful onomatopoeia reveals its meaning: thunder.
Weather words are great, aren't they?
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