Jan. 7th, 2005 10:55 am
Let it rain congealed dew!
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muckefuckFinally, the list lives up to its name! It actually contains more than a hundred words, but that's just as well since I don't know that all the entries would survive close scrutiny. (I'm especially afraid of having munged the Saami.) I'd like to thank everyone who contributed words for "snow" in the multifarious languages of the world, but special regard is due ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moominmolly for ransacking online dictionaries with the same fervour as I brought.
Looking over the list, I'm surprised by the degree of uniformity among the Indo-European languages. Excepting Rumanian zăpadă (from a Slavic word meaning "fallen stuff"), Sanskrit hima (and its Romany descendent iv), and Albanian borë (who knows?), only four distinct roots are represented. Three of these, represented by Greek χιών (cognate with Armenian dzjun/tsiwn), Breton erc'h, and Persian barf (source of Hindi, Kurdish, and Pashto terms, unless I miss my guess), account for only a handful of languages. All the remaining terms ultimately derive from PIE *(s)neigh-.
Is this really surprising? I suppose it depends what you compare it to. For the other cases where I know synonyms in a fair number of languages, the picture is more diverse. "Ice", for example. Each of the major branches--Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, etc.--prefers a different root. Why so much more agreement on "snow" than on "ice"--or "man" or "river" or "leaf" for that matter? It's a similar story with Afro-Asiatic; their varied appearances notwithstanding, the Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew words all go back to same proto-Semitic root, *θalg-. And despite customarily wide divergences in vocabulary, all the Berber languages share the word adfel.
Speaking of Berbers,pacotelic asked whether Saharans have a word for "snow". The Berbers may be a special case, since only some of them are desert nomads; most live in high mountains where snow is not unknown. (But why should their desert-dwelling cousins hundreds of kilometres away retain the same term?) I wasn't very successful tracking down snow words in other Saharan languages, but you'll see there's a smattering from tropical and subtropical regions around the globe.
How do inhabitants of the tropics name somethings that they've never seen? The same way anyone names anything unfamiliar: (1) By borrowing; (2) by stretching an existing word; or (3) by getting creative.
Some languages borrow more easily than others, but most tongues with a literary tradition have some dead language they can look to to supplement their vocabulary. So the Thais turn to Pali (a close relative of Sanskrit) and adopt hima[*], the Vietnamese to Classical Chinese (the relationship is a little clearer if you compare tuyết to Cantonese syut rather than Mandarin xǔe--Mandarin really is the French of Sinitic sublanguages), Indonesians and Swahilis to Classical Arabic. Tongan just took the English snow and Somali baraf is presumably another form of Persian barf.
Baraf, however, designated not just snow, but ice as well. Although snow may be unknown in the tropics, ice isn't, since hail can be found practically everywhere there's rain. Many languages have extended the meaning of a word meaning "hail", "frost", "cold mist", or even "extreme cold" to cover a range of phenomena that would be more finely distinguished by us northerly folk. Oromo c'abbii covers all forms of frozen water. Some dictionaries I consulted gave "hail" for Fulfulde marmalle, others "snow". Hausa k'ank'ara may be the broadest of all, meaning "stone, flint" in addition to "hailstone". (Again, I'm less than certain that this is the proper Hausa term for "snow", but it may be as close as they get. The Kikongo dictionary, for instance, threw up its hands and simply provided a sentence explaining what the substance was.)
Other languages get a little more specific--and picturesque. The Mpongwe, a Bantu group of Gabon, and the Maoris, about the only Polynesians to see much of the stuff, compared snow to foam, calling it respectively "rain-foam" and "flying foam". For the Austronesian people of Madagascar, it is a rain (orana) of hoarfrost (fanala) and for the Yoruba, congealed (dídì) dew (ìrì). I'm a little taken aback to find supposedly distinct roots for "snow" in the native Southern African languages. The Nama dictionary noted next to the term tsamárò that is was "Biblical", suggesting that it was coined by some missionary to the Kalahari for translation purposes and could well be unknown to your average Hottentot. Could the story be the same with the Zulu and Xhosa words?
[*] At least supposedly they do. Only one source listed this word and I couldn't find it in any Thai-English dictionaries.
moominmolly for ransacking online dictionaries with the same fervour as I brought.Looking over the list, I'm surprised by the degree of uniformity among the Indo-European languages. Excepting Rumanian zăpadă (from a Slavic word meaning "fallen stuff"), Sanskrit hima (and its Romany descendent iv), and Albanian borë (who knows?), only four distinct roots are represented. Three of these, represented by Greek χιών (cognate with Armenian dzjun/tsiwn), Breton erc'h, and Persian barf (source of Hindi, Kurdish, and Pashto terms, unless I miss my guess), account for only a handful of languages. All the remaining terms ultimately derive from PIE *(s)neigh-.
Is this really surprising? I suppose it depends what you compare it to. For the other cases where I know synonyms in a fair number of languages, the picture is more diverse. "Ice", for example. Each of the major branches--Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, etc.--prefers a different root. Why so much more agreement on "snow" than on "ice"--or "man" or "river" or "leaf" for that matter? It's a similar story with Afro-Asiatic; their varied appearances notwithstanding, the Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew words all go back to same proto-Semitic root, *θalg-. And despite customarily wide divergences in vocabulary, all the Berber languages share the word adfel.
Speaking of Berbers,
pacotelic asked whether Saharans have a word for "snow". The Berbers may be a special case, since only some of them are desert nomads; most live in high mountains where snow is not unknown. (But why should their desert-dwelling cousins hundreds of kilometres away retain the same term?) I wasn't very successful tracking down snow words in other Saharan languages, but you'll see there's a smattering from tropical and subtropical regions around the globe.How do inhabitants of the tropics name somethings that they've never seen? The same way anyone names anything unfamiliar: (1) By borrowing; (2) by stretching an existing word; or (3) by getting creative.
Some languages borrow more easily than others, but most tongues with a literary tradition have some dead language they can look to to supplement their vocabulary. So the Thais turn to Pali (a close relative of Sanskrit) and adopt hima[*], the Vietnamese to Classical Chinese (the relationship is a little clearer if you compare tuyết to Cantonese syut rather than Mandarin xǔe--Mandarin really is the French of Sinitic sublanguages), Indonesians and Swahilis to Classical Arabic. Tongan just took the English snow and Somali baraf is presumably another form of Persian barf.
Baraf, however, designated not just snow, but ice as well. Although snow may be unknown in the tropics, ice isn't, since hail can be found practically everywhere there's rain. Many languages have extended the meaning of a word meaning "hail", "frost", "cold mist", or even "extreme cold" to cover a range of phenomena that would be more finely distinguished by us northerly folk. Oromo c'abbii covers all forms of frozen water. Some dictionaries I consulted gave "hail" for Fulfulde marmalle, others "snow". Hausa k'ank'ara may be the broadest of all, meaning "stone, flint" in addition to "hailstone". (Again, I'm less than certain that this is the proper Hausa term for "snow", but it may be as close as they get. The Kikongo dictionary, for instance, threw up its hands and simply provided a sentence explaining what the substance was.)
Other languages get a little more specific--and picturesque. The Mpongwe, a Bantu group of Gabon, and the Maoris, about the only Polynesians to see much of the stuff, compared snow to foam, calling it respectively "rain-foam" and "flying foam". For the Austronesian people of Madagascar, it is a rain (orana) of hoarfrost (fanala) and for the Yoruba, congealed (dídì) dew (ìrì). I'm a little taken aback to find supposedly distinct roots for "snow" in the native Southern African languages. The Nama dictionary noted next to the term tsamárò that is was "Biblical", suggesting that it was coined by some missionary to the Kalahari for translation purposes and could well be unknown to your average Hottentot. Could the story be the same with the Zulu and Xhosa words?
[*] At least supposedly they do. Only one source listed this word and I couldn't find it in any Thai-English dictionaries.