How Many Names For Hot?
The notion that Eskimo people have a particular and large number of words for snow has become a popular urban myth that even has a Wikipedia entry:
In reality, the number of words depends on the definitions of Eskimo (there are a number of languages) and snow, and on the method of counting numbers of words in languages that have quite different grammatical structures from English…the number of Eskimo words for snow is essentially unbounded.
This came up because The Scout was looking at a book titled, The Newfoundland Tongue (why she was looking at that particular book is another story). It lists forty-three terms that Newfoundlanders use to describe wind. Here are a few examples:
