Skimo words for snow

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

The perfect allegorie for love

- What is love for you?

- How would you represent it? 

Whether you thought the questions were difficult, don't worry. It looks like Katy Perry, the Californian singer has finally made up an idea which has been her inspiration to her videoclip: Unconditionally. As you could have easily predicted, the singer talks about a relationship where one of the lovers (the singer herself) promises to love the other on unconditionally. Are you wondering if id this a true feeling? Well, we never know, but her idea of love looks very realistic although, actually, it's hard to get it at the beginning!

Now, have a look at the lyrics:

Oh no, did I get too close?

Oh, did I almost see what's really on the inside?

All your insecurities

All the dirty laundry

Never made me blink one time

Unconditional, unconditionally

I will love you unconditionally

There is no fear now

Let go and just be free

I will love you unconditionally

Come just as you are to me

Don't need apologies

Know that you are worthy

I'll take your bad days with your good

Walk through the storm I would

I do it all because I love you, I love you

Unconditional, unconditionally

I will love you unconditionally

There is no fear now

Let go and just be free

I will love you unconditionally

So open up your heart and just let it begin

Open up your heart and just let it begin

Open up your heart and just let it begin

Open up your heart

Acceptance is the key to be

To be truly free

Will you do the same for me?

Unconditional, unconditionally

I will love you unconditionally

And there is no fear now

Let go and just be free

'Cause I will love you unconditionally (oh yeah)

I will love you (unconditionally)

I will love you

I will love you unconditionally

Did you understand it all? Probably not. Anyway, here you have a news article from MTV which can help us clear up our minds.

Katy Perry cited "Dangerous Liaisons" and "Anna Karenina" as two of the inspirations for her dreamy "Unconditionally" video, which she premiered during "MTV First: Katy Perry 'Unconditionally'" on Tuesday.

But, those movies are just jumping-off points for the video. MTV News chatted with director Brent Bonacorso, who dished on what he wanted to capture in the video.

"When she sings this song she doesn't sing it lightly. This love that she speaks of is like a force of nature, epic storm and a tempest, and that's definitely something I wanted to capture," he said, adding that he wanted to capture a "more mysterious, elegant and sophisticated world to live in... less about a time period and more about creating an impression and a feeling."

That "feeling" is expressed using various unforgettable images, including a car crash and setting a bed on fire. But, what does it all mean? Well, he revealed all.

'Unconditionally' Video Expresses Power Of Love And Beauty

Crash Into Love

At one point, Katy gets hits by a car, a visual metaphor for the power of true love. "One of the key images that I think was pivotal in the video and just a very important concept to me. I once described the experience of falling in love like being hit by a car; suddenly your world is just so violently and dramatically changed. It hits you out of the blue," Bonacorso explained. "I shared this with Katy and she really loved that concept and really identified with it immediately, that she felt the same way."

Sex On Fire?

Fire and snow are two elements that play important roles in the video. And no image is as arresting as seeing a bed get lit on fire in the middle of a party. "And then we talked about how love can burn you like an inferno, like it's this fire inside you that you just have to let out," he said. "And, so she was really identifying with these concepts, and I think perhaps from her own experiences, she felt that those worked for her world and her experiences."

Flower Power

Not only does Katy get hit by a car, but she's surrounded by a tornado of colorful flowers. Those two images are related to one another, Bonacorso notes.

"It's a symbol of just joy that kind of joy in love, that explosion of color, explosion of wonderful things. The car crash and the kind of flower crash happen simultaneously," he said. "And the car crash obviously represents the sudden almost violent nature of love when it really gets its hooks into you and really changes your world. And then the flowers kind of represent that joyous and wonderful, yet still forceful impact of that love when it enters your life. And so we're kind of playing around with these two crashes. How beautiful and soft, but still spectacular that could be."

Is This A Dream?

Katy exists in two places, alone in the snow and also surrounded by dancers in a fancy ballroom. Those places are more psychological than physical.

He explained, "And the idea there is if you go along with non-narrative way of approaching this particular video, of using these metaphorical allegories to give this impression of love. Also, each world represents a different part of the subconscious."

Wise As An Owl

Katy befriends an owl in the video. And this winged pal plays a significant part in the story.

"Symbolically, again, using these dream-like allegories and there was quite a bit of thought put into this... but I wanted to create in the mind of the viewer this impression of unconditional love and the owl is just an undeniably powerful symbol of something strong, something free and something powerful," he said. "She lets it go into the world and that literally letting this force within her go wild. That's an important part of love is that you have to let it go. I believe there might be an old saying about that."

Sweet songs and strong coffee

 There’s a dreamy atmosphere to Adjuntas, a coffee town in the Valley of the Sleeping Giant high in the mountains of Puerto Rico. A deep love of the land and its customs runs through this place, where people say their families have lived ‘since forever’ and formal good manners rule daily life. You smell it in the surrounding streets, where food is cooked at roadside barbecues. You see it in the graceful horses paraded through town on holidays and you feel it in the large, elegant square, with its fountains and stone benches. Several decades ago, this love of the land motivated the local people to oppose a massive mining operation. The mountains surrounding Adjuntas are rich with gold, silver, copper and zinc and the Puerto Rican government had reserved about 80 square kilometres for mineral exploitation. People fought to protect the land despite the promise of jobs and money. They were saved by growing coffee and selling it throughout Puerto Rico. The profits helped the group to persuade the government to transform the mining zone into a national park, El Bosque del Pueblo, which is now protected by law. Opened in 1998, the park runs a reforestation programme allowing young and old to plant trees where land has been excavated. ‘Learning to manage the forest has been a kind of reincarnation for us,’ said Tinti Deya, a local resident. ‘It’s another world where we’re like children doing everything for the first time, except in our case we’re grandmothers.’ Grandmothers are everywhere in Adjuntas and they’re all respectfully addressed as Dofia. Lala Echevarria, an 85-yearold great-great-grandmother, was born on the oldest street in town, where she still lives in a small, immaculate home. Dofia Lala grew up before electricity and running water, and remembers when the first car arrived in Adjuntas. ‘As a child, I used to spend all my time carrying water, finding firewood, looking after the chickens and the cows,’ she said. ‘There were sixteen of us. We would wash our clothes in the river and we used to cook on an open fire. At meal times, we kids would sit on the floor to eat.’ Dofia Lala was working as a maid when she met and married the love of her life, Mariano the mechanic. They had thirteen children and shared 44 years before he died in 1983. She shows me the dozens of photographs of four generations of descendants that now fill her tiny home. Traditions in Adjuntas go back centuries to the mountains of ancestral islands such as Mallorca, Tenerife and Corsica. People play the old songs in the countryside and in little shops, like Lauro Yepez’s place where men meet to swap stories and have a drink. When I was there, troubadour Tato Ramos appeared and began to sing in a centuries-old flamenco style. Word spread fast. The shop filled with working-class men clapping, tapping and nodding to the music. Ramos improvised songs about growing coffee, welcoming visitors and ignoring parental advice, all topics requested by shop customers. ‘This is a forgotten art,’ said Yepez. ‘People give him a topic and he composes the song, in proper rhyme, on the spot.’ Later, I played the recording I’d made for my 88-year-old Spanish father, who has Alzheimer’s disease. His dark brown eyes twinkled with recognition. He nodded his head, smiled, and said, ‘Oh yes, this I remember, this I remember ...’

What colour is Tuesday?

My name is Mark. I’m Canadian and I have synesthesia. It’s not a disease (although I think it  sounds like one) and it doesn’t really have any serious  effects on my day-to-day life, but it is a strange  condition. Synesthesia happens when two or more of  your senses get mixed up. So in my case, for example,  I taste words. My sense of taste works even when I’m  not eating anything, but when I hear or read certain  words. For me, the word ‘box’ tastes of eggs. That’s  just one example, of course. I’m reading one of the  Sherlock Holmes stories at the moment and ‘Sherlock’  is another ‘egg’ word! It’s a bit too much sometimes. There are quite a few famous people with synesthesia:  artists like David Hockney and Kandinsky, and musicians  like Stevie Wonder and Liszt. Unfortunately for me I only  share my synesthesia with them, not any great artistic  skills. I read that Kandinsky’s synesthesia mixed colour,  hearing, touch and smell. To be honest, I don’t think I’d  like that. It seems very complicated.  My sister is synesthetic too and she sees words in  colour. So when she sees the word ‘Tuesday’ or just  thinks of the word ‘Tuesday’, she gets the feeling of  ‘brown’. Actually that kind of synesthesia, where the days  of the week are coloured, is the most common type. I  read somewhere that synesthesia is connected to the  way our brains develop language and that there’s a link  between sounds and shapes. I don’t understand the  idea very well, but it sounds fascinating.

New York before

Of all the visitors to New York City in recent years, one of the most surprising was a beaver which showed up one morning in 2007. Nobody knows exactly where the beaver came from and ecologist Eric Sanderson explains that, although beavers used to be common in the area in the 17th century, there haven’t been any for more than 200 years. For Sanderson, the beaver’s appearance was symbolic. For ten years, he’s been leading a project to visualise what the area used to look like before the city transformed it. As Sanderson says, ‘There are views in this city where you cannot see, except for a person, another living thing. Not a tree or a plant. How did a place become like that?’ In fact, long before the skyscrapers came to dominate the view, this place was a pristine wilderness where animals like beavers, bears and turkeys would roam freely through forests, marshes and grassland. Its ecology was as diverse as Yellowstone or Yosemite today. There used to be sandy beaches along the coasts and 90 kilometres of fresh-water streams. Sanderson’s project resulted in a 3-D computer model of the area. You can pick any spot in modern New York and see what used to be there. Take Fifth Avenue, for example. A family called Murray used to have a farm here and in 1782 (during the American War of Independence) the British troops landed near here. Legend has it that Mrs Murray offered the British officers tea while George Washington’s troops slipped past them, down what is now Broadway. ‘I’d like every New Yorker to know that they live in a place with amazing natural potential – even if you have to look a little harder to see it,’ says Sanderson.

You can see Sanderson's speech in TEDtalk here

Hurricane EARL?

Nobody can tell you how serious Hurricane Earl might be, but we can tell you why Earl has that name. (A pretty friendly name for such a potential disaster.)

Briefly, here’s how the monikers for storms are picked. The world is roughly divided into six major basins where storm activity occurs. Each basin has an organization that comes up with lists of names a few years in advance. The basins don’t all follow the same rules for coming up with the names. In one basin, they don’t even use human names necessarily. But the namers for the North Atlantic and Northeastern Pacific share the following system, according to the National Hurricane Center: male and female names alternate in alphabetical order, and the gender that the list starts with alternates every year. The lists are recycled every six years.

(The difference between hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons is another fascinating story, which is explained here.)

Letters that rarely begin names (like Q) are excluded from consideration. (There will never be a Hurricane Quetzalcoatl.) Not until a tropical depression transforms into a tropical storm is it eligible for a name. Wherever the storm-level activity kicks in determines which basin has naming privileges.

When tropical storms reach a certain velocity, they become hurricanes or cyclones. Hurricane names can be retired from the list if they have caused a certain level of destruction. And if there are so many storms in one region that all the alphabetical names are used up, additional storms are called “Alpha,” Beta,” etc., through the Greek alphabet (alpha, beta . . .)

The following are the remaining names on the 2010 North Atlantic list: Gaston, Hermine, Igor, Julia, Karl, Lisa, Matthew, Nicole, Otto, Paula, Richard, Shary, Tomas, Virginie, and Walter.

Originally the names for storms near North America were only female. The sexist implications of the practice led to the current system.

Historically, an earl is a title of nobility, a rank below that of marquis and above that of viscount. Sort of a medieval middle manager. The name Katrina is a version of Katherine, which derives from the Greek word meaning “pure.”

Do you give Presents or Gifts?

On december we are all making our lists and checking them twice. All this holiday shopping got us thinking: where do the words gift and present come from? Why does English use both? It’s not just so that children can ask for toys in multiple ways.
Language is not a linear, predestined development. Even though it may feel as if the language we speak is in some way the logical conclusion of thousands of years of development, every word that we use has a unique, sometimes circuitous history.
The word gift wandered through multiple meanings before arriving at its current common meaning: “something given voluntarily without payment in return, as to show favor toward someone, honor an occasion, or make a gesture of assistance.” In Old English, its most dominant meaning was “payment for a wife,” or a dowry. Gift originates in the Proto-Indo-European base ghabh- which came from the Sanskrit word gabhasti meaning “hand or forearm.” (Gabhasti is also the root of the word habit.) While gift became associated only with marriage payments, the related verb give followed a different trajectory of meaning; it denoted the specific act of putting something in someone else’s hands, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Around the 1300s, the word gift began to assume a more general meaning of an object freely given to another person.
But what about its synonym present? Present was imported into English from Old Norman (also called Old French). Present originally meant the same thing as the adjective present, “being there.” It was used in the French phrase mettre en present, to mean “to offer in the presence of.” By the early 1300s, it became synonymous with the thing being offered. (Present did not acquire the sense of “the present time” until the 1500s.)
A more recent evolution of the term came in the popular word regift. The word refers to the common practice of giving away a gift that you received from someone else, like candles, bubble bath, and ugly slippers.

If gift and present do not suffice, you could always use one of these gift-related terms:
lagniappe, succor, potlatch, bonhomie, beneficence

 

(When did gifts become an essential part of the Christmas holiday? Learn more about Santa and his sidekicks here.)

Where does the word Hobbit come from?

J.R.R. Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892. In honor of the author’s beloved Lord of the Rings series of books, we pay tribute to his fantastic creation, the hobbit. Hobbits are similar to humans, but they are short and have hairy feet. Bilbo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, and Frodo Baggins are the most-well known hobbit examples. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction, they’re the peaceful folk who reside in Middle Earth.
(On a side note, if you’ve ever wanted to know what the “J.R.R.” in Tolkien’s name stands for, here’s the answer.)
As you may have guessed, hobbits are a fictional race born in Tolkien’s imagination. He even created an etymology for the word; hobbit derives from the word Holbytla, which means “hole-dweller” in Old English. Tolkien invented three groups of hobbits. The Harfoots were the smallest of all the hobbits and also the first to enter Eriador, a large region of Middle Earth. The Fallohides are the least numerous of the Hobbits and tall and fair. The Stoors were the last to enter Eriador. They stand out as being the only hobbits that are willing to swim.
Now here’s the fascinating and slightly spooky detail. There are no references to hobbits before Tolkien’s publication, except for one. In 1895, the folklorist Michael Aislabie Denham published a long list of supernatural creatures. Here’s an excerpt: “. . . nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits . . .”
While Tolkien was a masterful adapter of mythology and folklore, there isn’t the slightest suggestion that he was aware of this list. Synchronicity, coincidence, or serendipity? Tolkien’s interest in language predates his career as a professional writer. After World War I, the Oxford English Dictionary was Tolkien’s first employer. His job at the dictionary involved working on the history and etymology of Germanic words that begin with “W.”

Is text messaging ruining English?

With every generation come cries that teenagers are destroying the language with their newfangled slang. The current grievance harps on the way casual language used in texts and instant messages inhibits kids from understanding how to write and speak “properly.” While amateur language lovers might think this argument makes sense, experts say this is not at all the case. In fact, linguists say teenagers, far from destroying English, are innovating and enriching the language.
First of all, abbreviations like haha, lol, omg, brb, and btw are more infrequent than you might imagine, according to a 2008 paper by Sali A. Tagliamonte and Derek Denis. Of course, 2008 is a long time ago in terms of digital fluency, but the findings of the study are nevertheless fascinating. Looking at IM conversations of Toronto-based teenagers, Tagliamonte found that “the use of short forms, abbreviations, and emotional language is infinitesimally small.” These sorts of stereotypical markers of teen language accounted for only 3 percent of Tagliamonte’s data. Perhaps one of her most interesting findings is that older teens start to outgrow the abbreviation lol, opting for the more mature haha. Tagliamonte’s 16-year-old daughter told her, “I used to use lol when I was a kid.”
Tagliamonte, who now is exploring language development in texting as well as instant messaging, argues that these forms of communication are a cultivated mix of formal and informal language and that these mediums are “on the forefront of change.” In an article published in May of this year, Tagliamonte concludes that “students showed that they knew where to use proper English.” For example, a student might not start sentences with capital letters in IMs and text messages, but still understands to do this in formal papers. Tagliamonte believes that this kind of natural blending of conversational registers employed by teens would not be possible without a sophisticated understanding of both formal and informal language.
It was once trendy to try to speak like people wrote, and now it’s the other way around. For the first time in history, we can write quickly enough to capture qualities of spoken language in our writing, and teens are skillfully doing just that. John McWhorter’s 2013 TED Talk “Txting is killing language. JK!!!” further supports the idea that teens are language innovators. He believes their creative development of the English language should be not mocked, but studied, calling texting “an expansion of [young people’s] linguistic repertoire.” He singles out the subtle communication prowess of lol. Teens are using it in non-funny situations, and its meaning has expanded beyond just “laugh out loud.” Now it can be used as a marker of empathy and tone, something often lacking in written communication. This is an enhancement–not a perversion–of language. There’s also evidence to suggest that lol sometimes carries a similar meaning to wtf (and furthermore, the abbreviation wtf is more functional and sophisticated than it seems).
Teens aren’t the only ones opting for abbreviations in written communication. The first citation of OMG in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1917 letter from the British admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher to none other than Winston Churchill. He writes, “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis–O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)–Shower it on the Admiralty!!” Clearly, to give young people all the credit for spreading new abbreviations would be shortsighted, though this letter does bring up the question of where Admiral John Fisher first encountered OMG. Perhaps he picked up this colorful expression from his grandchildren.