MargenThe myth says it's the Inuit who have endless words for snow. But when the University of Glasgow compiled the great historical thesaurus of Scots, it found something better documented: 421 terms related to snow in that language.
«Feefle» is snow that swirls around a corner. «Flindrikin» is a light snowfall, almost a token one. «Skelf» is a large flake. «Unbrak», the first sign of the thaw.
It isn't a surplus of vocabulary: it's attention. Where snow decides whether the livestock eats or not, reading the sky precisely is a matter of survival, and that precision ends up in the dictionary.
Every language keeps a map of what its speakers cared to look at closely.
Source: Universidad de Glasgow