Levels of speech Different words and expressions are used when talking to an unknown person or a superior, as opposed to when talking to a child, family member or a close friend. Origins and significance. If you know of any such words, please list them in the comments section below. The Eskimo or Inuit Words for Snow. While we believe the list to be almost complete, we do accept that other Eskimo / Inuit words for snow may exist.

In English, there are around 12 words to describe snow, including hail, sleet, ice, icicle, slush, and snowflake. When I posted the link to this article on Twitter, Bojan Glavašević, a Croatian linguist, and a politician, gave me an idea. Soon after that, the linguist Carol Eastman claimed "many". I am from Florida (as you shall see later…), which gets about as much snow as Okinawa which gets no snow… so living (and driving) in a area (Fukui, Japan) that has a good bit of snow … Very interesting perspective and how the word snow in different languages of Europe came to be. Studies of the Sami languages of Norway, Sweden and Finland, conclude that the languages have anywhere from 180 snow- and ice-related words and as many as 300 different words for types of snow, tracks in snow, and conditions of the use of snow.

It is not just the Eskimo languages that have so many different words to describe their surroundings. A Blizzard of Snow Words. Learn several useful vocabulary words relating to snow. words that are pronounced the same way, but have different meanings. Snow wolf in Japanese? Roger Brown's Words and Things claimed that there were exactly three Eskimo words for snow (based apparently on a drawing in Whorf's paper). Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does. Incredibly, they also have around 1000 words for reindeer. In addition, there are relatively many homonyms, i.e. The 47 Eskimo words for snow listed above are the result of extensive research carried out over a number of years. However, there are many words for fire in Japanese, and I am not certain if kaji is the best word to use in this context. Map with etymological focus – putting together countries and languages based on their "true" etymological origin. Other words for fire in Japanese are "hi" and "ka".