Are there really up to 400 different words for snow in the Eskimo language? Linguist Mikael Parkwall deals with linguistic myths and claims.
We can say that the myth of the "snow words" from the Inuit language has the most enduring popularity of all linguistic myths. Despite active protests, he is still alive. But it should immediately arouse suspicion that the number of snow designations is constantly changing, no matter who you ask: 40, 46, 60 and even “hundreds” in general.
Anthropologist Laura Martin traced the source of the myth and appears to have been the work of legendary linguist-anthropologist Franz Boas. This myth originated in 1911, when a linguist claimed that habitat influences vocabulary, and as an example of this he casually mentioned that Inuit have "four, maybe more" different words for snow.
It was then quoted by a follower Benjamin Whorf, who by mistake (?) Slightly increased the word count. Whorf, in turn, began to be quoted by others, and everything went on increasing, like a snowball. Nowadays, you can sometimes come across a statement of at least 400 words for snow.
What is the truth? To begin with, of course, we need to figure out what is generally considered a word. The language of the Eskimos is polysynthetic, which means that a lot of information is stuck together in one very long word, which in Swedish or English would become a whole sentence. We can partly do this in Swedish too: we say lastbilschaufför in one word, while a Briton will say lorry driver in two words.
But the Eskimo language goes further, including verbs in its monstrous words, so that the sentence "They will claim that he is a great artist, but …" in Greenlandic will be expressed in a single word: Aliikusersuillammassuaanerartassagaluarpaalli.
Are we going to take it as a word? If you take it literally as a word, then you have to admit that there is more extensive "truck" terminology in Swedish than in English, since this language does not have a separate word for a truck driver. But isn't it absurd? Indeed, in English there is a linguistic expression of the concept of "truck driver", just in two words.
Since the Inuit went a little further than the Swedes, of course, the number of possible combinations increased significantly. Anyone who can say "my snow" in one word can probably say both "your snow" and "their snow". But to say that all these are separate words of the language is simply ridiculous, because this would mean that in the Greenlandic language there are more words in general in all areas than in Swedish or English.
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The only sensible way in this case is to limit ourselves to the roots, otherwise it turns out that in the Swedish language, with its ability to form compound words, there are hundreds of "terms" for snow, for example, blidsnö (melted snow), blötsnö (sleet) and decembersnö (December snow).
The "snow myth" is so widespread that some have tried to count all the variations of the words for snow in a number of Eskimo languages. Depending on which of the related variants they studied, and also on which terminology they adhered to, the results obtained, of course, varied. In most cases, however, the result did not exceed a few words, and very rarely there were more than a dozen.
Conclusion: No, this is a myth.
If we decide to count all the words that touch the snow in one way or another, then there will be as many "snow terms" in Swedish as in any Eskimo language.
Mikael Parkvall