Can you believe there’s a language spoken by a snow-afflicted people that has quite a few words for snow?
The language is English.
A quick search of a thesaurus found 10 words that mean “crystallized water that falls from the sky” in Chicago each winter: blizzard, dusting, flurry, powder, slush, snow, snowfall, snowflakes, snowstorm, whiteout.
All that stuff about the Inuit having 400 words for snow is a bunch of bunk.
“They have somewhere between 4 and 10 basic words for snow,” said Bob Mucci, an anthropology professor at Indiana University Northwest in Gary. “Their language is full of prefixes and suffixes and infixes [additions inside words that add nuance to its meaning] that give an undetermined number of distinctions.
“In the days before winter sports, we didn’t have these other words. [The Inuit] have a lot of words for snow, but so do skiers.”
