More than 20 words for snow

Author : Rob Ashton

Posted : 03 / 02 / 09

Here in the southeast snow all-but brought normal business life to a standstill yesterday. And it’s not much better today.

Here in Emphasis towers we’re made of sterner stuff: it takes more than a few snowflakes to deter us from our vital work of showing people how to write better business documents.

Like everyone else though, we have snow on the brain at the moment – particularly as our boiler broke down two weeks ago. (We’ve all been sitting around in hats and scarves ever since, waiting for the heating engineer to return with the right bits to mend it.)

As everyone knows, the Eskimos have more than a dozen words for snow. Or is that just an urban myth? We’ve broken out our grammatical snow shovels and have been doing a bit of digging to get to the bottom of the story.

It seems it might be true after all too. According to Professor Anthony Woodbury of the University of Texas at Austin, there are in fact at least 15 different word groups for snow in the Yup’ik Eskimo language, as you can read here. That’s not as amazing as it sounds, though. In English, he counted 22. Why so many?

Well the Eskimo list is bulked up by words for snow formations and meteorological terms such as ‘pirta’ which means ‘snowstorm’. It includes words for which we have no equivalent, such as ‘qanisqineq’ meaning ‘snow floating on water’. But the English list includes words like ‘flurry’, ‘dusting’ and ‘blizzard’, as well as words we’ve adopted from French such as ‘cornice’ and ‘avalanche’.

So now you know.