Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga!

Apparently this is Greenlandic Eskimo for ‘I should stop drinking.’ (This expression might actually be common on the streets of Greenland considering that alcoholism is a big problem there...) Not only is this jawbreaker incredibly long and weird looking, it has many parts-of-speech in one word! This is very common in Eskimo languages, since their speakers’ sense of what can be packed into a word is completely different than ours (that is if you speak English). Languages that work like this, where whole phrases or clauses can be formed in one word by attaching affixes to noun stems or verbs, are called polysynthetic. So, for example, instead of having a separate word for the adverbs ‘probably’ or ‘badly,’ the suffixes –qquuq and –nirluk are added to the verbs. And with affixes substituting our various wordclasses, nouns in Greenlandic can have up to 312 different combinations each and verbs more than 1000!

The “zillion-words-for-snow-in-Eskimo” myth

Have you ever heard the urban legend that Eskimo has an insane number of words for snow? People have studied how this myth began, and they concluded that in the earliest citations the list was only made of four or seven snow words. Somehow it snowballed up to hundreds. So is it wrong? Well, it depends on how you count. First of all, we have to define what is a word. Considering that Eskimo languages are polysynthetic it is difficult to compare them to English. One word in Eskimo is doing the job of many wordclasses in English. ‘Bad snow,’ an adjective and a noun in English, is for example kaniktshartluk in Eskimo where ‘bad’ is expressed with the suffix –tluk.

Secondly, when people try to make a list with snow words in Eskimo, they often include words for ice. In fact, the Eskimo languages have only two root words for snow: kanik, which means snow in the air, and aput, which means snow on the ground. Modifying nouns can be added to these root words to create more words, but English also does that; snowfall, snowdrift, snowshoe, etc.

And thirdly, if we decide to leave all those complicating affixes out of the picture, and just count roots (for ‘snow’ and ‘ice’) and derived words, we will see that although Eskimo does have many words for snow, so does English. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 125 compounds of the word ‘snow’ alone! We’ve also got avalanche, blizzard, dusting, flurry, frost, hail, igloo, powder, sleet, slush, etc…

So the fact that Greenlanders live in a snowy country does not mean they have a huge vocabulary for snow (which reminds me of the fact that despite being called Greenland it is not at all that green…and by the way, that ”myth” about Iceland being green and Greenland icy is true – there are no Eskimos in Iceland). However, I can’t resist citing some of the great compounds about snow that exist in Greenlandic: I love ‘ice swelling over partially frozen river, etc. from water seeping up to the surface’ which is siirsinniq, ‘rotten ice with streams forming’ aakkarniq, ‘new ice formed in crack in old ice’ nutarniq and ‘small ice floe (not large enough to stand on)’ masaaraq. Now if only I knew how to pronounce that!