> Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation in Language Log: The list of snow-referring roots to stick [suffixes] on isn't that long [in the Eskimoan language group]: qani- for a snowflake, apu- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow#cite_not...
The Lexical Elaboration Explorer app does not allow one to see the actual words for snow for any language, so the tool is mostly a geographic and word-density plotter, but neither the article nor the website add much nuance to this debate. The hypothesis is fairly obvious: languages have words for common things. It's not really falsifiable and I find this type of analysis typical of modern research. Sloppy, surface-level, coding-tutorial demonstrations of mostly useless data display.
I'm not going to say that language doesn't say anything about culture in general. But I do think that most specific analyses chasing after this idea are doomed to say more about the analyst than they do about the analyzed.
No because, Firn and Harsch are words on their own.
Yes, because of the way the German language works. It tends to create new words by combining old words not by creating new short words (Dialects like Bavarian work differently though, they often tend to create new words).
Then after centuries people forget that and think it's one word. Like "Enttäuschung" (disappointment) which people no longer realize what the two words are and that "Enttäuschung" really means that you had been deceived ("Täuschung") and now are not longer - the deeper meaning of "Enttäuschung" in German. Same for "Werkzeug" (Tool) - the words get their own identity.
What I found most interesting was Rücksicht, Vorsicht, Nachsicht, Einsicht, Weitsicht (and more) where probably no German would think they are the same word, "Sicht" combined with another one. All of those words have their own, distinctive identity.
From my perspective this is the hoax. I come from the alps and we have dozens of terms for snow. Only those people without snow might have one word, because they have no need to describe different versions of snow. I remember Sulz, Firn, Neu, Kunst, Matsch, Harsch, Papp, Pulver, ... (left 35 years ago).