r/etymology • u/Potential_Actuary275 • 2d ago
Question Words Question
Do indigenous languages in tropical regions have words for things like snow and ice?
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u/FedeConlangerITA 2d ago
Words express concepts, so, if a concept is unknown to a population, then this one has no word for that concept
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u/phdemented 2d ago
Plenty of snow on the mountain in tropical regions, and snow does (rarely) fall in lowlands
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u/tekkerslovakia 2d ago
No, for the same reason that indigenous Inuit languages don’t have a word for kangaroo
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u/Ham__Kitten 1d ago
Inuktitut has no trouble expressing the concept of a kangaroo. They're not an uncontacted tribe or something.
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u/Odd-Promotion2743 2d ago
For very small communities in tropical lowlands awsy from mountains, the answer is no. That's the case for much of lowland South America for example. But, people living within sight of mountain ranges, like the Andes or the New Guinea range, do have a way to describe the snow they see in the distance.
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u/ShalomRPh 1d ago
I once asked a Cuban coworker what the Spanish word for a walrus was. (Why? I’d seen an Argentine pressing of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, and in Argentina all song titles have to be translated to Spanish, so it was “yo soy la morsa” or something like that but I couldn’t remember at the time).
He had no idea what a walrus was. I brought in a magazine photo of one and he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, but he still didn’t know what it was called in Spanish.
He said “Where does this thing live?” I told him near the North Pole. He says “Is there anyone living there that speaks Spanish? Maybe there just isn’t a word for it.”
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 2d ago
This is a very nebulous question. In parts of India that never see snow and ice there are words for these things, which some people may have seen in some so-called hill station and certainly heard of or seen from people who have seen them in Kashmir or England or Iran or Central Asia or wherever, and this is certainly an old thing. And people see icecubes in their freezers or glasses of soft or indeed hard drinks. If you ask whether there was a time when people living far away from places that have snow and ice had words for these, presumably the answer is no. The North Sentinelese maybe don't.
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u/Temporary_Pie2733 2d ago
Why not? “Tropical” just means “located between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn”, not “hot”. In Quechua, for example, the word for “ice” is rit’i.