Friday 7 January 2011

A Dictionary of English Snow & Ice

I've recently had to do some work on the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis. By chance over the Xmas period the BBC's Timeshift featured Scandanavian crime fiction.  These came together, a bit, in Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.
Over a coffee yesterday an old comrade of Tommy Sheridan was telling me about how myth becomes reality.  We spoke about what we'd been watching and reading and when I spoke about Smilla he nodded sagely and repeated the myth that the Greenlanders have 30-40 words for snow.  I don't actually know many words there are in the Greenlandic language for 'snow' or 'ice' but it doesn't matter. What matters is that 'they' are lexical extremists whereas 'we' English speakers only have 'snow' or 'ice, except for:


bed of snow,
black ice,
blizzard,

calotte,
compacted ice,
crushed ice,
drifting snow,
driven snow,
dry ice,
a dusting of snow,
firn,
floe,
floeberg,
flurry of snow,
freezing fog,
freezing rain,
fresh snow,
frost,
frozen snow,
glacial ice,
glacier,
glaze,
hail,
hoar,
iceberg,
ice cap,
ice cube,
ice floe,
ice shelf,
icicles,
impacted snow,
liquid ice,
melting ice,
meltwater,
névé,
pack ice,
rocks (in a drink),
sheet ice, 
sleet,
slush,
snow cap,
snowdrift,
snowfield,
snowflake,
snow line,
snowstorm,
snow water,
snow-wreath,
virgin snow,
white-out,

and the ice you get in a freezer which I don't know the name of but isn't like an ice cube

By my reckoning that makes 53 in total but if anybody ever reads this and knows more please get in touch.