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Comment by KGIII | Hacker News Reader

About that snow claim... It's more nuanced than that.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/no-the-inuit-dont-have-1...

Sorry about the source URL, but it is actually a good article. I live in the mountains of Maine. We don't have enough words for snow. We do have lots of phrases to describe the many different types of snow, however.

And there are lots of types of snow, both as it is falling, how it is as it lands, and how it reacts after the storm. I love the stuff and can probably come up with accurate descriptive phrases for hours.

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See also Geoff Pullum's classic "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax"

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf

The power of agglutinative languages. Here is an apparently valid German word that takes one minute to say: https://youtu.be/Brt6F4cGFCY

Agglutinative...

1. How long have you been waiting to use that in a sentence?

2. German has a word for everything. "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." There is a German word for exactly that.

Anyhow, we really could use more words for snow. I've seen stuff falling from the sky that there are no words for. Some of it doesn't defies even simple phrases.

As I've said before, I love snow. I do live here for a reason.

There are no words for this slush-like substance that falls from the sky, sometimes as small clumps but other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground. This happens usually when the air temp is just a bit above freezing, it is warmer down in the valley than it is here, and the higher air remains pretty warm until there is a cut-off a few thousand feet above you and the air gets much colder. Also, it tends to be high ambient moisture content to the point where you have a moderately dense fog.

There's probably a German word for that, but there's none in English and I doubt the Inuit people have one either.

Seriously, there is a lot of different types of snow. I didn't realize there were this many until I retired and moved here. Now I know...

By the way, the locals would call that 'the start of a good old fashioned New England shit-storm.' It often ends with frozen rain or sleet. I could go on for hours about the different types of snow. 100 words wouldn't even begin to cut it.

I guess it depends on your definition of “a word”. I speak Danish and it shares a lot of concepts with German.

Joining or concatenating two nouns or a noun and an adjective form “a new word”, but the meaning is of course based upon the two other words.

So if I were to construct a word about the car, I could go like: anden-gears-sving-fejltænding. (Literally, second gear turn misfire). Typically hyphens are omitted, but they are optional.

Is that a new word? Not in Danish, it is just four other written with no spaces in between. Written together they describe a specific situation/concept. But there is no new word.

Is this the same concept as when in English or other languages one does: those-words-with-hyphens (e.g. "this is a not-very-good-with-german type of question")

I would say that it is equivalent in concept, but it is more of a grammatical rule.

For example, "football stadium" is written in two words in English. In German it _must_ be written as "Fußballstadien" -- making it look like German has a lot of "special" "words". They are just concatenations to form nouns.

*Fußballstadium, singular :).

> There are no words for this slush-like substance that falls from the sky, sometimes as small clumps but other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground.

That sounds like what we call "räntä" in Finland, which, according to Wikipedia, is called "sleet" in Commonwealth countries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_and_snow_mixed#Terminolog...

Definitely not what we call sleet. These are balls of slush, not liquid but slush. They'll have varied sizes, weights, and consistency. Sleet, here, is more like frozen rain.

Picture nearly melted snowflakes, on the verge of melting - so that they are almost translucent. Now, clump them together, somewhere in the atmosphere. Sometimes, the clumps will have a diameter of as many as six centimeters, but that's pretty rare. Usually, they are only two to four centimeters.

Those fall out of the sky. Usually, I will see that just a couple of times per season. Some years, I don't see it at all. It really depends and it only happens when the conditions are just right.

My elevation is about 925 meters. I'm a bit above the 45°, the meridian. I usually get about 3.75 meters of snow, per season,

(I converted it to metric for you.)

I've never seen snow quite like it elsewhere. I'm sure it exists elsewhere, but I've never seen it.

"Sludd" in Norwegian, "sleet" in English - but I wouldn't use either to describe what sounds like "wet hail":

> other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground.

... Just for (very) wet snow.

Right. It clumps together when it falls, so it is like a lightly packed wet snowball when it reaches the surface. I typed out a bit more of a description in my response to their same post.

I'm not really sure what to call it?

I think (I'm guessing) I understand what you mean - but like big hail, I've never seen it. I think the biggest hail I've seen is close to a cm in diameter. Which is nothing compared to the egg sized hail some places get somewhat regularly...

Only soft, not hard like hail.

"My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline."

I don't think there is a German word for that? What is that word?

Oh, I don't really speak German and was making that up. But, it wouldn't surprise me if they had such a word. German likes to cram words together and make really long, very precise, words. I don't speak it well enough to guess what this would be, but I do understand a little.

This is the first search result for one search:

http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabu...

They don't. Compound words in Germanic languages are basically always nouns. So you'd have to rephrase your example a bit to make a German (or Swedish, etc) word out of it.

> There's probably a German word for that

As a boring compound there is Schneeregen (snow-rain), but there is the shortened "Schnegen". Although the latter isn't used as a noun often, more commonly as a verb ("es schnegnet")

> How long have you been waiting to use that in a sentence?

One of my best mates is a speech pathologist with a love of language. She throws out that word with a casual flair... :)

I am suitably impressed. I love to see constructive use of obscure vocabulary. HN constantly surprises me with the intelligence of some posters.

It reminds me, at times, of my university days. That may not seem like a compliment, but it is absolutely meant to be. See, I have a Ph.D., in Applied Mathemstics - from MIT.

HN sometimes reminds me of those university experiences. I find it comforting to not be the smartest person in the room. It makes me feel honored to be here.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

> agglutinative

Or as my math professor friend likes to say, “German is closed under concatenation” (and “Latin under permutation”)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(mathematics)

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