More words

Oct 18 16:27 UTC 2000

I have read that Eskimos have many words for snow, and that Americans have
many words for other things that are important to them, such as money and
cars.  Please list some words for motor vehicles (one or two per response)
with definitions.  To start with, could someone define the difference between
a car and a truck and a van?  (Many languages do not distinguish, for instance
Serbian has 'kola' - motor vehicle, and 'leka kola' - light motor vehicle
which I think may include pickup truck).  

response 2 of 70:

Oct 18 16:55 UTC 2000

I dunno how that went through, since I froze up on the last line, and wasnt'
finished. Weird.

What I was also going to provide was a disclaimer: My knowledge is rusty, and
so I may have some (important, even) details wrong. The critical reader is
advised to consult "the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" by Geoff Pullum, which
is the original source of my comments.

The book may be located via
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226685349/o/qid=971887601/sr=8-1/re
f=a
ps_sr_b_1_3/104-0501829-4910308

and is most likely available in major university libraries (such as U-M).

response 4 of 70:

Oct 18 19:46 UTC 2000

May the record note who has selected to commence name-calling in this item
("priggish"). Change of pace, I suppose, but all the same... ;}

Fine. You want priggish, here's priggish:

Many languages don't HAVE words as we identify them. In general, when comments
like the challenged one are made, what are being referred to are morphemes.
What is meant, in general, by a statement like "Eskimo has two dozen words
for snow" is (technically speaking) "Iniut/Iniktitut has two dozen morphemes
for snow." That (more technical) statement is untrue.

The linguistic definition of "word" is hazy at best (as opposed to sentence
on the one hand... which is also hazy, and morpheme on the other, which is
generally better behaved, but also hazy in certain languages, such as the
Semitic family, where core concepts -- slm for religious concepts, for
instance, ktb for books or teaching, if I recall my Arabic -- are indicated
by consonants while interstitial vowels fine tune -- Islam vs. Muslim).

That is also why "adjective" was in quotes in my first post. I'm fully aware
that the components which serve the semantic function of adjectives are
generally affixes in Iniut/Iniktitut.

Taking the broader statement represented in #3, with Marsh's (utterly uncited)
implicit defintion of word, there are approximately infinite number of words
in Iniut/Iniktitut for snow. There are likewise approximately infinite number
of words in Iniut/Iniktitut for heat wave. 

The Eskimo languages have roughly the same number of distinct morphemes for
snow as any other language that has encountered snow.

Better?

response 6 of 70:

Oct 18 20:04 UTC 2000

You know, I called NO ONE "priggish". There is probably no one in the
category, so why get all stressed about it?

Donald B. Marsh, D.D., was once the Bishop of the Arctic, out of Toronto.
I doubt he was as versed as Mr. Know-It-All in language theory - I'd
say he was just a learned observer, talking in vernacular. 

response 8 of 70:

Oct 18 22:06 UTC 2000

I remember that there are three Greek words that translate to "love" in
English
and they all describe a different kind of love.  eros,philos, and agape
(erotic love, brotherly love, and spiritual love)

response 10 of 70:

Oct 18 23:10 UTC 2000

Proto-Indoeuropean used to also be based on morphemes consisting of consonant,
variable vowel expressing change in meaning and another consonant.  Sing sang
sung is a remnant.  Slavic preserves this well in many irregular verbs.
There were alternations between short and long vowels.  
Anyone want to list such groups of related words in English as gild/gold,
red/ruddy, blink/blank (are these related?), hold/held, whole/heal/health?
Some of these are of later origin, but not sit/set/sat.

response 12 of 70:

Oct 19 01:19 UTC 2000

  re #1:  It snows in Hawaii, at least at higher altitudes, so I'd guess
  that there's already a word for snow in the Hawaiian language.

  [those who haven't visited the island of Hawaii (i.e. "the Big Island")
  may not realize it, but the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa are at almost
  14,000 feet.  That makes them taller than all but a few of the peaks in the
  contiguous 48 states and taller by far than anything east of the Rockies. 
  When you consider that unlike the peaks in the Rockies, Andes, or Himalayas
  the Hawaiian volcanoes begin from the ocean floor tens of thousands of feet
  *below* sea level and *still* extend to almost 14,000 feet above, they're
  really pretty mind-boggling..]

response 14 of 70:

Oct 19 11:44 UTC 2000

just for giggles, count the number of definitions for the word "in" listed
in the oed.

response 16 of 70:

Oct 19 16:09 UTC 2000

re #12: I love the big island of Hawaii.

response 18 of 70:

Oct 20 15:12 UTC 2000

With the exception of corn and moguled, there's no word on that list that I
wouldn't understand in a conversation with a skier, and few words on the list
that I wouldn't use if I were asked to describe snow (I doubt I'd use
scalloped or rutted).

response 20 of 70:

Oct 20 17:43 UTC 2000

Hmm.  I used to talk about the "grain" of snow a lot.  When I was
commuting by bicycle in the winter, I was mostly riding on roads covered
by snow packed by cars.  There'd be a kind of ruts in the snow, but not
always visible, because they consisted of strips of more and less
densely compressed snow, generally running parallel to the direction
cars were driving.  You can ride on such grained snow if you stay
exactly parallel to the grain or if you are at a sharp angle to the
grain, but if you try to travel at a slight angle to the grain, it'll
pull your wheels out from under you.

There are also issues of how much ice versus snow was involved.  Snow
that lots of cars have driven over can be packed quite solid without
turning to ice.  But just in front of stop signs, or other places where
cars brake a lot, they slide over the snow instead of rolling over it,
so the friction melts the snow and makes it into ice which is much more
slippery than packed snow.  You can ride across iced patches, but you
don't try to steer or brake much on them.

On hills, the downhill lane is usually packed very smoothly and
uniformly, making good riding because cars mostly just coast down them.
But on the uphill lane where there is a lot of wheel spinning, the snow
is more likely to be uneven, with broken up or ice patches mixed in, so
it is sometimes useful to shift over to the downhill lane even if you
are going uphill (traffic permitting).

Intersections are usually a morass of packed/unpacked snow and ice with
lots of odd lumps and bumps.  Pedestrian paths are really bad, with lots
of foot-sized potholes and bumps.  Very difficult and bumpy to ride on.

So after about 13 winters of bicycling on city streets, I had made a
pretty broad study of different road snow conditions, and could assess a
chunk of road by degrees of packedness, iceness, meltedness, sandiness,
saltiness, uniformity and grain, and choose the best path to navigate
it, always keeping in mind that the cars on the road weren't entirely
under anyone's control and so needed to be given wide berth.  I didn't
do a lot of talking about this to other people, since I don't know many
people who bicycle in the winter much, so I didn't develop an awful lot
of specialized vocabulary, but I never found ordinary English too
inadequate for the job.

response 22 of 70:

Oct 20 19:00 UTC 2000

*nods* My point being that ordinary Iniut and ordinary English have roughly
the same descriptive flexibility in this regard.

response 24 of 70:

Oct 21 02:06 UTC 2000

re14: russo, you priggish motherfucker!