If snowboarding lingo sounded like an alien language, the snow-covered kiddie hill that sprawled below me looked like another planet.
Even before it became a common place to assume that "the Eskimo have a hundred words for snow" the languages of hunting and gathering people have played an important role in debates about linguistic relativity concerning geographical ontologies.
A significant advantage of having local teachers as language instructors, as Snow (2007) identified,2 is that they can "inspire students to believe that success is possible" and provide students with a good role model (p.8).
The claim that Eskimos have about a trillion words for snow may be a false one -- actually, Eskimo languages have about as many synonyms for snow as English does -- but it remains true that the language of a culture can be fascinating and illustrative.
Nor, as the linguist Geoffrey Pullum explains, are Eskimo languages actually especially rich in snow terminology.
Languages often reflect the different priorities of cultures--groups living in Arctic regions, for example, often have multiple words for "snow".
The language in which the snow is described is loaded with the guilt of our actions: "pillowed like a sin", its sheets are the "wafers of pitiless communion", its "fall" un-mistakably lapsarian.
The demands of academic discourse change throughout development, with an increasing emphasis on explanatory talk and more complex and literate language forms (Nippold, 2010; Snow, 2010).
Coon means "snow" in his language, and Come was attached arbitrarily and inexplicably by a non-Indian census taker.
"Extreme Ops" is rated PG-13 for video-game-style extreme snow stunts, strong language and spin-the-bottle sexuality.
