English to French translation

A hundred words for snow?

April 23, 2004

Language Hat has debunked one of my favourite linguistic facts, which has been around for ages and that I've often heard quoted by people who seemed to know what they were talking about. I genuinely believed that Eskimos had one hundred words for snow, proving that language is a cultural product manufactured by people to make sense of a common reality. If there's a lot of snow where you live, you probably have lots of words to differentiate its different types according to texture, weight, colour, etc. whereas people from the Sahara desert would just see white stuff and would only need one generic word.

However, Geoffrey Pullum explains in this entry that it is not the case. Language Hat also provides that famous list of 100 words for snow. Or so I thought at first. I actually excitedly went to read the list before I read the entry properly, which means that I believed what I was going to read was the fruit of hours of painstaking research in polar temperatures. I'm amazed at my own seemingly limitless gullibility and embarrassed to confess that alarm bells only started ringing when I got to:
gristla: deep fried snow

Comments

Peut-être que les Esquimaux n'ont pas vraiment cent mots pour la neige, mais je pense que les Français ont réellement mille sortes différentes de fromage. :)

I think the idea that other cultures have lots of words for important objects/references is probably one shouldn't be totally disregarded. When I lived in Finland I understood that they have a specific term to describe the autumn colours that doesn't translate in a straightforward way into English. If experiences are more varied, then inevitably more terms are required to differentiate between the (what outsiders might perceive to be) subtle differences.

Actually a gristla poutine is quite good and is served from small carts along the Rideau Canal in Montreal during winter. Ice wine makes a wonderful accompanyment.

;-)

I was amazed to discover that the eskimo for melted snow was identical to the Hittite word:

wa-ter melted snow

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