Although it is a myth that the Inuit have 50 words for snow, I got to thinking about it. Although I live south of Inuit land (I live on Treaty 1 land), I can recognise a number of different snow types of snow. From warmest to coldest - Frost (I don’t actually consider this snow). Freezing rain (occu…

[image] cadej: it is “blowing like stink”. I love it!! I wonder if the old three master’s used terms like that, at least informally. I can’t see Nelson using a term like that!

I find that the English language has lots of different words for waterways. It can be difficult to define the exact boundaries of edge cases. We have: River Stream Brook Creek Burn Sometimes these have different meanings in different places; for instance, in the Southeast Coastal US, “creek” mean…

[image] wildwestnature: really paralyzing winter storms called “snownamis”–worse than that would be “snowmageddon.” Whereas in the Pacific Northwest, it only takes two inches to be "snowpocalypse.’ [image] jurga_li: it is raining, but the water turns to ice as soon as it hits any surface…

Having grown up on the coast, I was used to the flags for different wind conditions: one red pennant for “Small Craft Advisory,” two red pennants for “Gale Warning,” and so on. I remember hunkering down in a U-Haul out on the Great Plains, the wind howling so hard it rocked the truck, and thinking, …

Oh it’s even funnier in the UK. For example: Avon River is literally - River River because Avon means River. I’m sure that happens elsewhere, but yeah, English speakers liked to mess up language >_< I live in the SE (alabama), and no one I know (including born-and-raised-here folk) uses “creek” t…

Here most “old” places like lakes and rivers have names from different language groups (before and around year 1000 there were baltic groups, then there were finno-ugric groups, then they lived with vyatichi or different slavic groups, then history is quite complicated in the last two centuries), so…

Interestingly (and off topic) Finno-ugric and Basque are the two languages in Eurasia not based on Indo-European, an ancient language that forms the basis of most languages from India to Spain. From what I know it was a slow spread, rather than one group conquering everything!

My Scottish country dance teacher (Canadian) used the expression, “It goes like stink!” to describe a figure(s) that needed to be executed really fast. It sort of made sense in a dance hall situation :wink:.

In the Southwest U.S., what we call a river (or rio) often wouldn’t pass for a drainage ditch in the eastern U.S. Lots of rios here that are essentially arroyos (dry ditches). Even when they do have water it’s often so little that you can literally step across the river from one bank to the other …

[image] mamestraconfigurata: Interestingly (and off topic) Finno-ugric and Basque are the two languages in Eurasia not based on Indo-European, an ancient language that forms the basis of most languages from India to Spain. From what I know it was a slow spread, rather than one group conquering e…

50 Words for snow - and other climate differentiations - #81 by system - Nature Talk

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