The skimo tribes, are not usally keen on the idea of being called
skimo. Instead of this, they prefer the word
Inuit because in their own language,
skimo means cannibal. No matter what name are they called by, the inuit language has shown its increadible variety of vocabulay in many ocasions. Take the word
igloo as an example. It is an Inuit word adapted to not only English but several other languages as well.
As you may have proably found out, the inuit language is a language which has a lot of technical words about extremely cold weather conditions. Therefore, the inuit language has about 50 WORDS refering to "snow"!!!
I found an article on The Washington Post which talks about this amazing fact:
There really are 50 Eskimo words for “snow”
Nicholas
Roemmelt: The Sami people, who live in the northern tips
of Scandinavia and Russia, have as many as 1,000 words for “reindeer.”
Anthropologist
Franz Boas didn’t mean to spark a century-long argument. Traveling through the
icy wastes of Baffin Island in northern Canada during the 1880s, Boas simply
wanted to study the life of the local Inuit people, joining their sleigh rides,
trading caribou skins and learning their folklore. As he wrote proudly to his
fiancée, “I am now truly like an Eskimo. . . . I scarcely eat any European
foodstuffs any longer but am living entirely on seal meat.” He was particularly
intrigued by their language, noting the elaborate terms used to describe the
frozen landscape: “aqilokoq” for “softly falling snow” and “piegnartoq” for
“the snow [that is] good for driving sled,” to name just two.
Mentioning
his observations in the introduction to his 1911 book “Handbook of American
Indian Languages,” he ignited the claim that Eskimos have dozens, or even
hundreds, of words for snow. Although the idea continues to capture public
imagination, most linguists considered it an urban legend, born of sloppy
scholarship and journalistic exaggeration. Some have even gone as far as to
name it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. The latest evidence, however,
suggests that Boas was right all along.
This debate
has rumbled on partly because of a grammatical peculiarity of the Eskimo family
of languages. Boas studied Inuit, one of the two main branches; the other is
Yupik. Each has spawned many dialects, but uniting the family is a feature
known as polysynthesis, which allows speakers to encode a huge amount of
information in one word by plugging various suffixes onto a base word.
For
example, a single term might encompass a whole sentence in English: In Siberian
Yupik, the base “angyagh” (boat) becomes “angyaghllangyugtuqlu” to mean “what’s
more, he wants a bigger boat.” This makes compiling dictionaries particularly
difficult: Do two terms that use the same base but a different ending really
represent two common idioms within a language, or is the difference simply a
speaker’s descriptive flourish? Both are possible, and vocabulary lists could
quickly snowball if an outsider were to confuse the two — a criticism often
leveled at Boas and his disciples.
Yet Igor
Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in
Washington, believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing
meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and
others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and
concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does.
Central
Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, while the Inuit dialect spoken in Canada’s
Nunavik region has at least 53, including “matsaaruti,” for wet snow that can
be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and “pukak,” for the crystalline powder snow
that looks like salt.
For many of
these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is even richer. In the
Inupiaq dialect of Wales, Alaska, Krupnik documented about 70 terms for ice that
mark such distinctions as: “utuqaq,” ice that lasts year after year;
“siguliaksraq,” the patchwork layer of crystals that forms as the sea begins to
freeze; and “auniq,” ice that is filled with holes, like Swiss cheese.
It is not
just the Eskimo languages that have colorful terms to describe their frosty
surroundings: The Sami people, who live in the northern tips of Scandinavia and
Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice, according to Ole Henrik
Magga, a linguist in Norway. (Unlike Inuit dialects, Sami ones are not
polysynthetic, making it easier to distinguish words.)
Many words
for reindeer, too
The Sami
also have as many as 1,000 words for reindeer. These refer to such things as
the reindeer’s fitness (“leami” means a short, fat female reindeer),
personality (“njirru” is an unmanageable female) and the shape of its antlers
(“snarri” is a reindeer whose antlers are short and branched). There is even a
Sami word to describe a bull with a single, very large testicle: “busat.”
This kind
of linguistic exuberance should come as no surprise, experts say, since
languages evolve to suit the ideas and needs that are most crucial to the lives
of their speakers. “These people need to know whether ice is fit to walk on or
whether you will sink through it,” says linguist Willem de Reuse at the
University of North Texas. “It’s a matter of life or death.”
“All
languages find a way to say what they need to say,” says Matthew Sturm, a
geophysicist with the Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska. For Sturm, it is the
expertise these words contain that is of most interest, rather than the
squabble about the number of terms. “These are real words that mean real
things,” he says.
Sturm is
particularly admiring of Inuit knowledge of the processes that lead to different
snow and ice formations, mentioning one elder who “knew as much about snow as I
knew after 30 years as a scientist.” In Sturm’s opinion, documenting this
knowledge is far more important than finding out exactly how many words for
snow there are.
Others also
recognize the urgency of this work. As many indigenous people turn away from
their traditional lifestyle, the expertise encapsulated in their vocabulary is
fading. That is why researchers such as Krupnik are trying to compile and
present their dictionaries to the local communities, as lasting records of
their heritage.
“Boas only
recorded a small fragment of the words available,” Krupnik says. In the
intervening century, much has been lost. “At his time there would have been
many more terms than there are today.”
By David
Robson | New Scientist, Published: January 14, 2013
English is a language spoken all over the world. It is spoken even by millions of people whose mother language is anotherone. That's maybe one reason why English is a language with such a fast and big evolution. Yes, it's true. English is changing everyday and it has changed all history long. There are everyday new words, expressions and pronunciations and it happens withou us noticing about it. Some of this new vocabulary is produced by joining different words. Some other words are originated when you use prefixes understood in other contexts in a new but logical way.
