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by Naritai 3322 days ago
This seems like a modern version of the old claim "Inuit have 100+ words for snow". I've found that's true for most of the claims of "X language has Y words for concept Z!!!" Inevitably it comes down to one of two things: -language X has a slightly different concept of 'word' than English does (such as allowing for conjugations to refer to past or future states) -The english word is question has a variety of context specific meanings or applications (such as 'love'), and each one of those meanings, even though their context-specific meaning would never be misinterpreted by an english speaker, has a different word in language X.
1 comments

It's a widely known myth, but I'm pretty sure that Inuit absolutely has 100+ words for snow: it's just that's a meaningless and unsurprising assertion. The Inuit languages are polysynthetic and can say in a word what European languages need a sentence for, so Inuit can sidestep Zipf's law on word frequency.

But also, English has plenty of words for snow, here's 50: https://www.thoughtco.com/snow-terms-types-3010117

Yes, I think we agree. Thank you for the additional info / detail.