LINGUIST List 5.1358

Fri 25 Nov 1994

Disc: Words for snow

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Dear Linguists,

I've been following the discussion about snowy words here and elsewhere
for some time now, and I can't but disagree with Douglas J. Glick (see
Vol-5-1322) in two points.

For one, I don't find the discussion "relatively uninteresting". It is
interesting indeed to see what kind of ideas about the issue as such and
linguistics in general tonguesters (or is l. more p.c.? :-) put forward.

It so happened that I encountered this nice passage in a book I bought a
few days ago:

 Whereas English [...] has only one word for _snow_ (or two if
 we include _sleet_), Eskimo has several.
 Trudgill (1974): 27

This is a book written for the general audience, by a native speaker of
English, who "has been a lecturer in the Department of Linguistic
Science at the University of Reading since 1970" (op. cit.), and it is
twenty years old. But you sometimes still hear assertions like the
above, and I know the same thing from German speakers. Still, in German
we have at least Schnee, Schnee (-mann, -regen, matsch), (Schnee)Flocke,
Neuschnee, Harsch, Waechte, Lawine, Loipe, Hagel, Graupel, and for
English, snow, snow (bank, fort, house, man, -mixed-with-rain, -flake, -
storm), slush(snow), (snow)cornice, avalanche, blizzard, dusting,
flurry, frost, hail, hardpack, igloo, pingo, powder, sleet.

In these lists, I'm including some at least seemingly semantically
transparent compounds like Neuschnee (`new+snow'), Schneeregen
snow+rain') and so on, as well as some words that are only frosty and
not very snowy, as well as some that have only to do with snow and
nothing else. In a serious collection, the data should be much richer,
in order to have a borderline between good and bad examples fall well
within the field, allow an assessment of the fuzzyness of this line,
and, perhaps, discover some model for the cognitive structure of the
words in question. (The data for the English list is, apart from some
editing, taken from Tony Woodbury's posting (see Vol-5-1239)).

Granted not everything white in the listings given is snow, how can we
comment on the quotation above? At least, the writer should have told the
reader why so many snowy words of English do not count as snow, or,
perhaps, that Eskimo in his opinion has no cover term, where English
does have one. As it stands, however, it should make everybody very
cautious about obtaining data of any language --- including, obviously,
their own --- by way of secondary sources. Likewise, how much do the
manymany `facts' drawn from `exotic' (i.e., not very well documented)
languages count, which, for example, phonologists like to decorate their
elaborate articles with?

Two, I don't really get the point in excluding words like cornice
from a snowy list. Now if there are people out there who use the word
primarily to denote some sort of snow formation and feel the word is in
its *architectural* meaning of rather metaphorical nature, what's the
point in telling them they're `really' wrong? In German, Waechte,
Flocke and Harsch might very well be derived from some other morphemes.
In fact, this only tells us Eskimo is not very well documented. I guess
a lot of those words the hoax claims as semantically primitive would
turn out much more connected to the rest of the vocabulary had we only
the relative wealth of historical data we have for the Indoeuropean
languages.

Back to German again, Flocke to me primarily denotes not `something
flaky' but rather precisely `a snowflake', and all other usages seem
to be derived from that. Harsch seems to be connected with harsch
`harsh'; but used as a noun, what other denotation but that kind of
slighly melted and frozen snow does it have? Loipe is the kind of
tracks skiers use in their discipline and, I guess, not a `very German'
word --- but disregarding borrowed words is just as silly as looking
down on adopted children. Anyway, there seems to be a need for that
word. It's snowy, very specialized, and, for my feeling, totally
unconnected with any other word in German.

Of course I might be totally wrong (and Loipe is derived from
(Ski)laufen `to run (to ski)'). Now there's the point. Linguists
are looking, on the one hand, into history to find out what really
happened and try to extrapolate people's minds to describe what's really
going on. If there's someone with a lot of Waechten and cornices
and flakes on his mind, but with no connection to other non-snowy words
for him, this is a fact of that ideolect. Of course, as soon some
linguist comes along and tells him the historical truth, behaviour and
concepts of the speaker might change... even if in fact it was some sort
of folk-etymology he absorbed when listening to the linguist :-).
Folk-etymology is there because it is a way we CAN imagine things to
be... so, what layer of this person's brain is it that synchronic word
counting is claiming to acount for, and how historical a derivation is
allowed or necessary in historical linguistics?

Finally, I would like to point out that apart from some pretty
specialized words having to do woth snow, rain is another phenomenon
languages may have more or less to say about. In German, for example,
you have Niesel and Nieselregen, denoting a very light rain or
spray. There seem to be no other uses or compounds for this word apart
from es nieselt, however, and no immediately related, more basic word
Niesel could be said to be derived from. So, we have Wasser, Regen,
Niesel, and more. Eskimo doesn't appear that much outlandish any more,
does it?

Quotation taken from:
Trudgill, Peter: _Sociolinguistics: An Introduction_. Penguin Books. 1974

 Wolfgang Lipp
 castorfub46.zedat.fu-berlin.de
 i52023sakura.kudpc.kyoto-u.ac.jp