Hacker News Reader

Comment by hannasanarion | Hacker News Reader

Flake, avalanche, snow, zastrugi, powder, firn, dump, pillow, iceberg, chop, snowball, flurry, yukimarimo, piste, ice, snirt, corn, blizzard, cornice, drift, freshie, smud, penitentes, frost, hardpack, slurry, berm, chowder, hoar, icicle, neve, slush, styrofoam, glacier, sleet, graupel, crust, crud, dendrites

I heard the Eskimos have over 50 words for a bad example

^ my favorite t-shirt.

So many of these studies also abuse compound words and misunderstand agglutination to produce their shocking counts.

View on HN

A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.

If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more.

Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.

>A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.

A lot of that is because we use multi-word phrases instead of single words to express a lot of ideas too. Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. Often we have a word but the other person just isn't familiar with it and assumes it doesn't exist, or assumes it's not known because it was borrowed into English.

> Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words.

The Romans believed that philosophy had to be done in Greek because Latin wasn't suited to the field.

There is a speech (letter?) by Cicero railing against the belief, in which he demonstrates that it's possible and in fact easy to use Latin for all of the concepts that are supposed to be restricted to Greek.

Apparently nobody learned anything from this.

> Apparently nobody learned anything from this.

Is it because he wrote it in latin?

English yet had to be invented, and in term of life span for egemony over western intellectual linguistic expression, Latin probably is still on the top of the podium by a large margin.

And of course many proeminent figures in philosophy expressed their major works in Latin.

Whoosh

Many Romans were grecophiles, and it showed. Not only did many feel Latin wasn’t a suitable language for philosophy, but also for mathematics. Of course, they also distrusted Arabic numerals.

> Of course, they also distrusted Arabic numerals.

Really? Did they ever see them? They had abaci.

Yeah. So, in the West, Rome proper didn’t allow Hebrew numbers. However, in Constantinople, all accounting had to be done in Greek or Latin and Arabic numerals were forbidden. One can cite all kinds of reasons: tax assessors not wanting to learn it, distrust of foreigners, the fact that the Rhomaioi were almost always at war with the Arabs and/or Turks.

The single-word for the concept of 'brotherly love' in english is 'camaraderie' in traditional usage or 'bromance' in colloquial American english.

A related annoyance is when people expect words in other languages to have exactly one clear (if not necessarily narrow) meaning (or spelling, pronunciation, etc.), even though English doesn't.

Other languages, especially languages that people actually used and that interacted with many other languages, are every bit as prone to complication as English.

Ancient or modern, masterful lyrical expression of love is the domain of the cunning linguist.

Also human subjectivity makes it kind of impossible to do this sort analysis in a systematic way that yields an apples-to-apples comparison. How do you properly account for slang or figurative language in a way that works consistently across languages when every dictionary you might use is maintained by a different group of people with different editorial standards?

And then, yes, agglutination. What's way more interesting to me than how many words Inuktitut or Chinese have for snow is the way the very structure of these languages illustrates how ill-defined a concept "word" is in the first place. You might think you know what it means in English, and that might transfer reasonably well to other Indo-European languages, but as you go further afield you start to see more and more examples where the concept needs heavy modification to remain useful.

You forgot haily puckles!

It feels like maybe that t-shirt misses the point.

For example, "avalanche" is not a word for snow. It's a word for a specific event involving snow. Having a word that meant "snow that is likely to cause an avalanche" actually would be a useful concept that isn't present in English.

Slab. Depth hoar. Slush. Cornice.

I like you t-shirt but I am kinda disappointed the list is 39 words but I guess it conveys the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com