Psychrolinguistics

I was going to title this 'cryolinguistics', but someone else already invented the term.   You have to admire the linguistic skills of anyone who can come up with a Department of Zaphodian Cryolinguistics


I propose setting up BLASWUM - the Branch of Linguistics for the Abolition of the Snow Words Urban Myth.  Now, given that Greek and Latin are so much more scientific than acronyms, I'm going to call this branch of linguistics psychrolinguistics.  The urban myth in question is the idea that the eskimo languages have more words for snow than any other language.   They don't.


The English language will casually steal any word that is left lying around by a careless owner.   If theft is impossible, the speaker of English will just make up a suitable word such as  kleptomaniac.   Having stolen the word iceberg, what does any self-respecting English speaker call bits of an iceberg?  Bergy bits, naturally.  Typical!  Just stick a 'Y' sound on the end of any word and you have a new word. Chunk - chunky, monk - monkey.   It's unscientific, I tell you!  What would happen if everyone went about just making up words?  It would be the end of civilisation as we know it.

There are more words in the English language for snow and ice in all of their many forms than, probably, in all other languages put together.  That's because we stole and adapted the words from so many languages.  But not all.  For example we haven't adopted nam keng, the Thai term for ice.  We already have a term for hard water, and it has nothing to do with ice.

All jesting aside, I am compiling a list of terms having to do with snow and ice.  It is huge.  The reason for the multiplicity of terms is the multiplicity of diciplines which have need of well-defined terms.

If you are going to try to understand the Arctic, you need to know the difference between pack ice and an ice pack a lot better than the Google search engine does.