Inuits have hundreds of words for sea ice (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Inuits have hundreds of words for sea ice (2013)

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37 pointskasperni47 comments

I always found this remarkable until someone pointed out in a book or article somewhere that the same is somewhat true in English for water. We have countless words for water depending on context -- river, ocean, sea, rain, reservoir, stream, brook, mist, wave, deluge, downpour, ice, snow, h20, cloud, fog, dew, hail, brine, precipitation, pond, lake, waterfall, condensation, canal, bay, channel, inlet, gulf, ford, snowflake, pool, waterspout, iceberg, lagoon, flume, spring, estuary, irrigation -- technically all of these refer to the same substance, just in different forms and places. It's the same in the Inuit language.

You bring up a good analogy, I feel like it doesn't take away the remarkable feeling for me however!

I can only come up with three-ish words for sea-ice. Although I do have many more concepts in my mind

Ice, iceberg, floating ice..

The fascinating this is when I learned that what you can communicate influences how you see and experience the world. Language has always fascinated me in that way

I do know more _concepts_ for sea ice though!

Meters-thick ice plateaus safe to live on for years (where ice bears live and hunt and so on)

Watery slushy ice you can easily sail navigate through with a boat.

50-200cm thick ice you can't go through with a small boat, thick enough to walk on.

Small ice platforms floating on the water, technically thick enough to stand on but what's the point since it's maybe 2 meters in diameter?

There're probably many more types of ice worth having a concept and eventually even a word for. If hunting is important for you, and there's a specific formation/type of ice where sea-lions typically gather, it's great to have a word for that!

A lot of a people's culture and a lot of individual's personal experience is embedded in the language they speak.

I would hazard it isn't your culture that is /embedded/ in the language, per se. It is more that your experiences are /compressed/ into your language.

You save no time by having shortened words for things that you could describe easily enough, if you aren't having to do so on a regular basis.

As an easy, for me, example. Consider the manipulation of cards. For most folks, you can flip a card. Rotate a card. Put a card on a table. Put a card in a stack on a table. Put it in a pile on a table. Etc., If you are a gamer, you draw a card, discard, tap, activate, hide, trash, remove, etc.. All have distinct differences that are only signified because they happen so often in a game that it wouldn't make sense not to compress them down.

Moving back to ice, I would hazard that there is probably not that many words for "sea-ice" in situations that are not encountered. Would love to know if I am wrong. (e.g., Asteroids made of salt water. Planets of frozen water? I could actually see either of those being in lore, but not sure.)

It's jargon. Jargon is extremely important to people in certain fields, but pretty worthless to others.

A wrench is a wrench when you just need a wrench. But a wrench is a combination wrench when you need a cone wrench.

> I would hazard it isn't your culture that is /embedded/ in the language, per se. It is more that your experiences are /compressed/ into your language.

Or perhaps it's this act of compression that creates an embedding of the culture in the language?

And even centuries later, when the compression isn't relevant anymore, there will still be remnants of the culture embedded in the language.

icecap, floe, berg, nilas

Don't forget creek, which has the added benefit of having a controversial pronunciation within the USA. :-)

I grew up in a part of Appalachia where half the population had a noticeably heavy accent, and the other half of the population had a more traditional standard American accent (broadcast English or general American, there are various names for it). The separation was often elaborated as creek vs crick people, based on how they pronounced the word creek. Interestingly the speech patterns were not solely an economic division (maybe 2/3 of the division was along an economic line), you would have one working poor family with the country/rural accent, and another working poor family next door that would have a standard American accent instead. It was always interesting to trace the roots of that based on where the families originated from (typically PA, MD, WV, VA, OH in the part of Appalachia I was from; as opposed to southern Appalachia), as it was pretty much always a family based accent distribution; the family history largely dictated the creek vs crick language division.

Best explained by American outdoor humorist Patrick F. McManus:

"Well, we had a crick," I said. "It wasn't much fun being poor if you didn't have a crick around someplace."

"You mean a creek?"

"No, I mean a crick. A creek is what rich people had. Poor people had cricks."

This is such an interesting phenomenon. I also see this happening with friends who speak english as a second language. They will say things like "Oh there isn't a word for that in english, its mean x and Y, etc." and they say that english just doesn't have certain kinds of words but often its that english DOES have a word for just that but the vocabulary knowledge isn't there (often even for me unless I think really hard because we dont use it much)

As pointed out elsewhere, this is not what the article is about. It's about preserving local knowledge of sea-ice hunting, partly by preserving the language used by sea-ice hunters.

and in german it's single words for composites:

waste-water, drinking-water, fresh-water, salt-water, dirt-water, ice-water, water-ice, spring-water, ...

Hmm... you're right.

dry, damp, foggy, misty, drizzle, sprinkles, showers, rain, downpour, deluge, torrent.

As a counterpoint from a linguist, everyone who's intrigued by this or the (nearly a century old!) "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" trope should read Geoff Pullum's "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax"[0]:

"The tale [...] is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people's languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself."

"Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact."

"Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng's Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos... snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes..." (p. 137). Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers... fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes..." Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation."

"The final words of Laura Martin's paper are about her hope that we can come to see the Eskimo snow story as a cautionary tale reminding us of "the intellectual protection to be found in the careful use of sources, the clear presentation of evidence, and above all, the constant evaluation of our assumptions.""

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

Edit: like topaz0 points out, the point of the scholarly work this article describes is to preserve indigenous knowledge and language, which is great, though I think it's still important to raise Pullum's points as a tonic for the exoticism that inevitably arises here, arguably even within the news article.

I know the term is in that Pullum essay, but please stop using the term "Eskimo". I know Americans still use it, but it's a racist epithet that really needs to go away.

The people are the Inuit, an individual Inuit person is an Inuk. Those are the terms that should be used.

Not contending your point that there are folks that don't like the word, but Inuit isn't always a good substitute. Turns out it's quite nuanced and complex so a bit of grace seems warranted towards those that aren't intimately familiar with the situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#Usage

For my own perspective, I am Canadian and that article is absolutely correct that the term is considered "racially charged" here.

It's also correct that "Inuit" doesn't encompass all Indigenous peoples of the Arctic... but it doesn't have to? I don't see why you need such a term. If you want to talk about the Yupik people, use that term. If you want an all-encompassing term, use "Indigenous peoples".

Even if, for whatever reason, you need a term that includes these ethnic groups, but excludes other indigenous peoples, then why does it have to be "Eskimo"?

As a white person, I'm an outsider to the situation so I'm going to take my guidance from Inuit groups themselves, and they object to the term. There's nothing complex about saying that it's a bad idea to call a people by a term that they themselves consider offensive.

Gotcha, so then, then the appropriate word would be whichever specific group you're talking about (Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, etc), or a less racist umbrella category that describes who you mean, like "indigenous people in the pacific northwest."

Or do what I would do in this case is generally withdraw from the conversation. I really don't want to needlessly offend folks by using terms out of favor, but upon reading the Wikipedia article it's clear I don't have remotely sufficient understanding of the cultures to successfully address the same population with some substitute that I naively pull out of my ass.

Wikipedia sees to imply that Inuinnaq is a more appropriate word, but I can't find mention of it elsewhere on the Web. Google returns only about 2000 results and they are not helpful.

Linguistics is hard.

Bob Laughlin, creator of the amazing Tzotzil dictionary, did some fun experiments about the use of native-speaker informants, by testing American undergraduates’ knowledge of breakfast cereals. There were some respondents who mixed up the cereals. Some who put them in a few categories (something like "cheerios", "flakes", and "cereal"). Some who left most of the questions blank. One respondent identified all of the cereals as “shit”, “shit”, “shit”, ... The best informant correctly identified 5/8 cereals. One of the presented cereals was actually toucan food, which was identified by various informants as “raisin bran”, “grape nuts”, “grapenuts flakes”, “fertilizer scented breakfast food”.

https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/1360 (see the introduction, pp. 9–12)

I can easily come up with more than 100 English words for snow. I'm sure someone who speaks English in a more temperate area wouldn't know has many. The difference between slush and sleet is important to me. Then there are slangs like powder that are just a way of saying great for downhill skiing (I don't ski: to me powder is a meaningless slang that I hear others use - those who ski may have more words than me to describe how good the snow is for skiing)

I'm not an English native speaker but I don't think powder is slang, it describes a specific kind of non compact snow, freshly fallen. The fact that skiers like it is coincidental. I don't think there is any other word for it that would be higher register.

Agreed. The Pullum article is one of my favorites.

Most of the comments here are making perfectly valid points about the whizz-bang "fact" from the title of the post. Note, however, that the actual topic of the article is very different: it's about an effort that was made to preserve native knowledge of sea-ice hunting that is being lost as both the Inupiaq language and the environment that it has long been situated in are fading. It is notably not about counting how many words there are for a particular thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the title was a joking reference to the "great Eskimo vocabulary hoax" that others are referring to here.

If you think about some tool or piece of equipment that has names for all the different parts that you had no idea even had names, but the people in that industry that use that tool require those names to make communication amongst themselves easier.

You can think of the "ice" and all of its "parts" important for those that spend much of their livelihood on and around it. If you're hunting or in a life or death situation in this environment, you'll want to be concise with your communication.

You also need to take "word" with a grain of salt, since we're dealing with a highly polysynthetic language. Many of those "words" would be substantial chunks of sentences to speakers of most other languages, with elements we'd think of as "words" being reduced to, say, a vowel or a vowel change in one of the other "word" elements. Language is really, really neat.

Yeah, the dictionary https://archive.org/details/kinikmisigumqan00weya lists many terms that are obviously related:

Sigu: Ocean pack ice, also a generic term that refers to all sea ice, including shore-fast ice

Siguliaq: Young ice, gray or gray-white in color

Siguliaksraq: “That which will become young ice”, grease ice

Also, they're not all terms for ice, they might just be related to life on the ice:

Arjuun: Paddle or oar; can be used to listen for sea mammal vocalizations underwater

My linguistics professor in Colorado drove this point home by asking the skiers in the class to list their words for “snow”. I think we got over 50 in just a few minutes.

Powder, corduroy, groomed, slushy, mogul, etc

Geologists have thousands of words for rock

^ nailed it

For the software crowd: We have at least hundreds of terms for "data structure". E.g. tree, binary tree, binary search tree, red-black tree, for just one path down the taxonomy of data structures. If I'm talking to a lay person, I generally just call all of them "data structure" unless they express deeper curiosity.

At a first glance, a lot of the words for "ice" here are referring to specific kinds of landforms.

English landform words for a particular kind include: mountain, mount, peak, hill, ridge, crest, rock, mesa, knob, butte, table, dome, mound. Another kind of landform is a river, brook, creek, flume, gully, gorge, stream, channel. Or maybe you're taking about a swamp, marsh, fen, moorland, bog, slough? And I'm not even getting to the technical terms here.

Here is the actual dictionary for those interested [1].

[1] https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/94115/kinik...

There are dozens of words for snow in American English. If you have ever skied you've probably at least encountered "powder". If you regularly backcountry ski you will have a huge vocabulary to describe snow, snow conditions, and the snowpack.

I don't think it's all that surprising that Inuits would have so many words to describe snow, if you spend any amount of in snowy conditions you will too.

It’s really interesting they have so many unique words for ice because the top 100 words in the Oxford English Corpus make up about 50% of all of written English. I wonder how often these words for ice are actually used in practice.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English

> According to The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists, the first 25 words in the OEC make up about one-third of all printed material in English, and the first 100 words make up about half of all written English.

Zipf's law has been found to be very robust empirically, so you can also assume the same holds (top 100 account for 50% of volume) for Inuit languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Language is fascinating. I was chatting with a friend from India and used the phrase "time is money." She looked at me with a funny expression and asked how I knew that. I explained the origins and meaning of the phrase and she laughed. She said that in her mother tongue the word for money sounds just like the English word "time."

I wonder how many of these localized, regional dialects will be lost over the coming decades.

I do think this is a pretty amazing list, despite what the naysayers say. But my question is why? What practical purpose does this fine-grained vocabulary serve? Are the people coining these words bored out of their minds, like a patient in the doctor's office counting the holes in the acoustic tiles?

For people living in the Arctic, ice and snow define the physical geography of their lives for over half the year and navigating that geography was/is essential to survival and recreation. Different kinds have different properties and different dangers to consider. Having distinct words for them is like saying mountain vs hill vs mesa, or river vs stream.

We have fine-grained vocabulary for snow in English too. Ask any skiier. I can tell you for certain we have hundreds of words for flowing water in English but I never figured that English people were bored when they coined a brook vs a stream vs a spring.

Inuit have 50 words for everything. In that language group, there are modifiers that change the word, so what might be a phrase in 'western' languages becomes a word.

Nothing to see here folks; move along.

reminds me of Smilla's Sense of Snow, where this idea plays a role.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilla%27s_Sense_of_Snow_(film...

It is likely as mythical as the claim that Inuits have more hand hundred words for snow.

I was randomly thinking about this the other day, and trying to think of things in English that have many words for the same thing (or variants of that thing).

I didn't think on it long, but only came up a few things: sex, genitalia, faeces and cannabis.

I bet they don't have words for sand or coconuts.

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