That's a relatively large number of words for snow

Have you heard the one about the Inuit and their collection of words for snow? Okay so it's not quite a joke but we do seem to have settled somewhere around 'urban legend'.

Benjamin Whorf, an American linguist, was one of the first to remark upon the large number of words the Inuit have for snow, but while Whorf found no more than he could count on his fingers, (seven distinct variants) later articles have inflated this number to fifty and beyond.

Thanks to such overzealous counting, the popular linguistic legend is now widely discredited but still provides food for thought in the brain-teasing realms of linguistic relativity.

Linguistic relativity is a fascinating hypothesis. At the core is the idea that the language we speak restricts the way we think about things and it goes as far as to say that if a language does not possess the words to describe a particular concept, then its speakers cannot have a cognitive thought about it. This is where those words for snow come into it.

Linguistic relativity holds up that, because our language determines how we perceive reality, the Inuit can break snow down into as many categories as their language allows (that's seven if we take Whorf's count), an English speaker by comparison can, theoretically, only perceive snow in one way - as 'snow'.

Such hard line principles are too strong for some palettes and despite my fascination with the subject, I would have to agree on the whole. Getting on board with linguistic relativity as a translator means accepting that there is a limit to what can be achieved by a translation. Theoretically, it is never possible to translate a concept into another language if that concept does not already exist in the target language. But that brings me back to what got me thinking about linguistic relativity in the first place.

Given that evidence in support of linguistic relativity is usually found between languages from distinctly different cultures, I did not expect to come across an example in Spanish, but recently, the Language Factory stumbled upon an absolute gem when needing to translate the single word 'chewy' into Spanish.

It would appear that the term 'chewy' when used in a positive sense (think cereal bar) has no translation into Spanish because 'chewy' always has negative connotations (think tough meat). This conundrum provoked much debate in the office before we eventually accepted defeat. Speaking to our translators revealed that there was no possibility of translating this word into Spanish because Spanish speakers do not share the concept of chewy in a positive sense.

I have always felt that there is something of the chicken and the egg in linguistic relativity, that it is not so much that our thought is determined by our language but that our language is determined by our thought. Is it really the case that Spanish speakers can't think about chewy in a positive sense because they don't have the language to express it? It seems more logical to conclude that since the concept does not exist, the language to express it need not exist either.

If my theory is correct then given a few more cold winters like this one then we should expect to see a few more words enter the English language to help us categorise types of snow. I expect the categorisation might extend from 'minor irritation snow' to 'can't get home from work snow'. Watch this space!

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