English has more words for want than the Inuits have for snow.
By
Glad Rag Kraken
on February 09, 2007
I don't know how many words for snow you heard the Inuit have, but look on thesaurus.com and ask yourself if any culture can have 27 words for snow.
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Discussion (6)
Could be, but English has more words for snow than the Inuits have for snow.
Want is an emotion. snow is just frozen water.
he didn't say it was unreasonable of us.
The Inuit also only have 4 main words from snow (although, since theirs is a constructive language, the potential number is limitless).
want actually has two meanings, and from thesaurus.com,
I saw these words for want:
"appetite, craving, demand, fancy, hankering, hunger, longing, necessity, need, requirement, thirst, wish, yearning, absence, dearth, default, defect, deficiency, destitution, exigency, famine, impecuniousness, impoverishment, inadequacy, indigence, insufficiency, meagerness, neediness, paucity, pauperism, penury, poorness, poverty, privation, scantiness, scarcity, shortage, skimpiness, and this is just some, follow the link for more.
Try to imply from the context of the claim: the same must be true for the Inuits; we are assuming this; it is understood.