Cultural vocabularies: how many words do the
Inuits have for snow?
The Inuits are not alone in having many words to describe a thing that preoccupies them,
patterns occur in the vocabularies of many cultures
Adam Jacot de Boinod
theguardian.com, Tuesday 29 April 2014 08.00 BST
It is informative to look at where the preponderance of words fall within
a language. We all know about the somewhat apocryphal plethora of
Inuit words for snow (many of which describe the varying stages of the
melting process) but it is undoubtedly true that the Hawaiians have 65
words alone for describing fishing nets, 108 for sweet potato, 42 for
sugarcane and 47 for bananas (the basic food stuffs). Scotland goes into
extraordinary distinctions for foul weather, Somali have a huge number
of words for camels (many of which depict their different basic feeding
and sexual practices) and likewise the Greeks have a range of
expressions for face slapping and the Baniwa tribe of Brazil 29 words for
ants and their edible varieties.
Take the Shona speaking people of Zimbabwe. They are chiefly an
agricultural people making the most from cultivating the plateau but
they have very specialised verbs for different kinds of walking: chakwair,
through a muddy place making a squelching sound; dowor, for a long
time on bare feet; svavair, huddled, cold and wet; minair, with swinging
hips; pushuk, in a very short dress; shwitair, naked; seser, with the flesh
rippling; and tabvuk, with such thin thighs that you seem to be jumping
like a grasshopper rather than walking.
Of course, as some words express all that is germane to a certain
climate, one wouldn't expect English to have a word like hanyauka (from
the Rukwangali language of Namibia) meaning to walk on tiptoe on
warm sand. Nor indeed would one expect thankfully many local concepts
to be imported into British life. One won't find an equivalent
for mmbwe (from the Venda language of South Africa) meaning a round
pebble taken from a crocodile's stomach and swallowed by a chief or
indeed, my favourite example of all: nakhur the Persian word for "a
camel that gives no milk until her nostrils are tickled".
What is so interesting is that there are a number of commonalities if not
universal sentiments that are expressed in the much smaller
vocabularies of the world's languages. Persian brings us mahj to define
looking beautiful after a disease and wo-mba, from Bakweri a language
from Cameroon, the smiling in sleep by children or termangu-mangu,
the Indonesian for "sad and not sure what to do".
If we look at something as universal as the range of colours, 21
languages have distinct words for black, red and white only; eight have
those colours plus green; then the sequence in which additional colours
.
are brought into languages is yellow, with a further 18 languages, then
blue (with six) and finally brown (with seven). As with colours, so with
the rainbow. The Bassa people of Liberia see only two
colours: ziza(red/orange/yellow) and hui (green/blue/purple) in their
spectrum. The Shona of Zimbabwe see
four: cipsuka (red/orange), cicena (yellow and yellow-
green), citema (green-blue) and cipsuka again (the word also
represents both the purple end of the spectrum). It is just Europeans
and the Japanese who see seven colours: red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo and violet.
The differing of cultural attitudes towards time are well articulated by
their vocabularies. While so many of the claims of languages to have no
words for "such and such" are apocryphal, it is only in Panjabi that they
have a word parson meaning either the day before yesterday or the day
after tomorrow. The notion of 24 distinct hours is irrelevant to the Zarma
people of Western Africas who use wete to cover mid-morning (between
nine and 10); the Chinese use wushi to mean 11 to one; and the Hausa
of Nigeria azahar takes in the period from 1.30pm to around three. The
Samoans' word afiafi covers both late afternoon and evening, from
about 5pm till dark. In Hindi pal is a measure of time equal to 24 seconds
andghari is a small space of time (24 minutes).
Even in Europe, with its relatively common linguistic heritage, national
individuality is healthily expressed in idioms carrying the same meaning
but vastly different and locally inspired usages. English talks of "carrying
coal to Newcastle" while Germans say Eulen nach Athen tragen (taking
owls to Athens), Italian has vendere ghiaccio agli eschimesi (selling ice
to the Eskimos), Spanish describes it as es como llevar naranjas a
Valencia(like taking oranges to Valencia) and Hungarian vizet hord a
Dunba(taking water to the Danube).
Instinctive reactions might be thought to be limited to one kind of vocal
range of expression. But if we touch a boiling kettle around the world,
the exclamation denoting pain has many varieties. In Korea you
say aiya! in the Philippines aruy! and in France ai! In Russian you
cry oj! In Danish it's uh! and in Germany auwa!
Likewise the way we articulate animal sounds makes one think we all
hear differently. Frogs in Afrikaans go kwaak-kwaak, amongst the
Munduruku tribe of Brazil: korekorekore while in Argentinian
Spanish:berp.
What has taken me five deep years of research delving into over 700
dictionaries of the world has been this attempt to discover the extent to
which the world's tribes are different from or similar to each other in
their articulation and that there is no real formulaic answer, indeed what
is likely to be the case is as often as not the reverse.
Much has been undertaken in recent years in linguistic
anthropology.Famously the Sapir-Whorf theories from the early 20th
century argue that language determines and limits thought or, as is
currently more widely accepted, that linguistic categories influence both
thought and some non-language behaviour but don't however limit
cognitive capability. Now, in linguistic anthropology, there is a whole
area exploring this while recently the focus has tended to look more at
social identities, interactions and shared ideologies