A Hundred Words for Snow (NHB Modern Plays)

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The claim that Eskimo words for snow (specifically Yupik and Inuit words) are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English, is often used to support the controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis or "Whorfianism". The strongest interpretation of this hypothesis, which posits that a language's vocabulary (among other features) shapes or limits its speakers' view of the world, has been largely discredited, [1] though a 2010 study supports the core notion that these languages have many more words for snow than the English language. [2] [3] The original claim is based in the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and was particularly promoted by his contemporary, Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose name is connected with the hypothesis. [4] [5] The idea is commonly tied to larger discussions on the connections between language and thought. TH: Grief, being an explorer in a world that’s melting, and being a teenage girl in a world that doesn’t think all that much of teenage girls. So much of this comes down to the joy of Barnett’s performance. Barnett is a master of comedic subtlety; her expressions are so warm, and she really grips the audience, from moments of elation and laugh-out-loud humour through to discomfort, loss and grief. We are right there with her at every turn, and the adventure feels authentically both physical and deeply emotional.

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Nils Jernsletten,- "Sami Traditional Terminology: Professional Terms Concerning Salmon, Reindeer and Snow", Sami Culture in a New Era: The Norwegian Sami Experience. Harald Gaski ed. Karasjok: Davvi Girji, 1997. Well, not literally. Literally he was a Geography teacher. But inside, she knows, he was Bear Grylls. A Hundred Words for Snow is about being an explorer in a melting world. It’s a coming of age story. With polar bears. Following a critically acclaimed run at the Vault Festival and UK tour, Tatty Hennessy’s A Hundred Words For Snow is coming to Trafalgar Studios 2 for a strictly limited four-week run.

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The essential morphological question is why a language would say, for example, "lake", "river", and "brook" instead of something like "waterplace", "waterfast", and "waterslow". English has many snow-related words, [15] but Boas's intent may have been to connect differences in culture with differences in language. Hannah Corbett’s Lighting and Dennis Dowding’s Sound Design provide nuance and subtlety to the play." Franz Boas did not make quantitative claims [6] but rather pointed out that the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, with the structure of these languages tending to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word. [4] [note 1] A good deal of the ongoing debate thus depends on how one defines "word", and perhaps even "word root".

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On the other hand, some anthropologists have argued that Boas, who lived among Baffin islanders and learnt their language, did in fact take account of the polysynthetic nature of Inuit language and included "only words representing meaningful distinctions" in his account. [3] Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington, supports Boas's work but notes that Boas was careful to include only words representing meaningful distinctions. Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does. Central Siberian Yupik has 40 terms. Inuit dialect spoken in Canada's Nunavik region has at least 53, including matsaaruti, for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh's runners, and pukak, for crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. Within these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is even richer. In the Inupiaq dialect of Wales, Alaska, Krupnik documented 70 terms for ice including: utuqaq, ice that lasts year after year; siguliaksraq, a patchwork layer of crystals that form as the sea begins to freeze; and auniq, ice that is filled with holes. Similarly, the Sami people, who live in the northern tips of Scandinavia and Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice, according to Ole Henrik Magga, a linguist in Norway. (Unlike Inuit dialects, Sami ones are not polysynthetic, making it easier to distinguish words.) [9]

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People who live in an environment in which snow or different kinds of grass, for example, play an important role are more aware of the different characteristics and appearances of different kinds of snow or grass and describe them in more detail than people in other environments. It is however not meaningful to say that people who see snow or grass as often but use another language have less words to describe it if they add the same kind of descriptive information as separate words instead of as "glued-on" ( agglutinated) additions to a similar number of words. In other words, English speakers living in Alaska, for example, have no trouble describing as many different kinds of snow as Inuit speakers. All of them, apart from Alaska maybe, are pretty inaccessible, but that doesn’t stop a determined 15-year old from going on the adventure of a lifetime. Krupnik, Igor; Müller-Wille, Ludger (2010), "Franz Boas and Inuktitut Terminology for Ice and Snow: From the Emergence of the Field to the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" ", in Krupnik, Igor; Aporta, Claudio; Gearheard, Shari; Laidler, Gita J.; Holm, Lene Kielsen (eds.), SIKU: Knowing Our Ice: Documenting Inuit Sea Ice Knowledge and Use, Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media, pp.377–99, ISBN 9789048185870