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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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