It’s an often-repeated “fact”, and an oft-debunked “fact”, that Inuit languages have over 50 words for “snow”. But is there any truth to the idea that the language has more words than elsewhere to describe solid precipitation? And are there other concepts in other languages that have a similar excess of words? A new study looking at 616 current and obsolete languages has a few answers.
Languages, as you might intuitively assume, are affected by our environments. This can be in the sounds involved (for instance, there is a suggestion that more hard consonants are used in areas of heavy rainfall and strong wind) or in the words themselves. For example, you might have less need to distinguish between the various types of spiders in the Arctic than in a country like Australia where the wrong kind could kill you.
In the new study, researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of California, Berkeley, looked at links between languages and concepts around the world. Looking at a digital dataset consisting of 1,574 bilingual dictionaries translating various languages into English, they were able to quantify how often a particular word shows up in each language, or words relating to a concept.
The team found a number of interesting things, including that languages including Latin, Italian, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Hindi have more words relating to “love”, while French, German, Kazakh, and Mongolian rule when it comes to words relating to “horse”.
The team were particularly interested in looking into the concept of “snow” given the often exaggerated idea about the Inuit language.
“Our results suggest the Inuit snow vocabulary is indeed exceptional. Out of 616 languages, the language with the top score for ‘snow’ was Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. The other two Inuit languages in our data set (Western Canadian Inuktitut and North Alaskan Inupiatun) also achieved high scores for ‘snow’,” the team writes in a piece for The Conversation.
“The Eastern Canadian Inuktitut dictionary in our dataset includes terms such as kikalukpok, which means ‘noisy walking on hard snow’, and apingaut, which means ‘first snow fall’. The top 20 languages for ‘snow’ included several other languages of Alaska, such as Ahtena, Dena’ina and Central Alaskan Yupik, as well as Japanese and Scots. Scots includes terms such as doon-lay, meaning ‘a heavy fall of snow’, feughter meaning ‘a sudden, slight fall of snow’, and fuddum, meaning ‘snow drifting at intervals’.”
Scots has previously been noted for having a lot of words for the cold white stuff, with 421 logged by a team compiling a Scots thesaurus.
While the countries with most words relating to “snow” were in snowy parts of the planet, the same did not apply to rain. The team attributes this to rain being important to survival, whether you get a lot of it or not.
“For speakers of East Taa, rain is both relatively rare and desirable,” the team explains. “This is reflected in terms such as lábe ||núu-bâ, an ‘honorific form of address to thunder to bring rain’ and |qába, which refers to the ‘ritual sprinkling of water or urine to bring rain’.”
Other interesting finds included that oceanic languages appear to have more terms relating to smell, such as Marshallese, which has specific words for the “smell of blood” and the “smell of fish, lingering on hands, body, or utensils”. Meanwhile, they found that terms relating to “dance” appeared to be more numerous in areas with smaller populations, lending support to a previous idea that dance is more important in smaller societies.
While interesting, the authors note a number of limitations, including that they were only able to access word counts. They attempted to account for words being used to explain others in the dictionaries, but say it is possible that it would have influenced their results to some extent.
The team provided an interactive tool so that you can input your own language, or a concept to see where it most crops up.
“Most importantly, our results run the risk of perpetuating potentially harmful stereotypes if taken at face value,” they add. “So we urge caution and respect while using the tool. The concepts it lists for any given language provide, at best, a crude reflection of the cultures associated with that language.”
The study is published in PNAS.
Source Link: Strange Link Between Environment And Vocabulary Revealed By Study Of 616 Languages
