Re: Another Thing From Straight Dope

>From: Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
>hmmm....
>the Eskimo Snow question in a whole new light (their attempted Eskimo
>sentence at the end)
>
>http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_297
Wow, it is what I've been told.  Someone told me there were only two words
for 'snow' (one for falling snow, one for snow on the ground).
Incidentally, I got *five* words for 'snow/ice/frost' in Tech (transcribed
in ASCII-IPA):

SyNw  'snow (falling)'
tSal.gw  'snow (on ground), frost'  (l. = retroflex l)
tS'ar?  'frost, frozen soil/mud'  (tS' = ejective tS)
k'irqw  'ice'  (from k'iruqa 'he froze')
k'arh  'ice'  (probable variant of previous)

However, the Techians haven't lived in a cold climate for millennia, so
derivations have appareard: the feminine form of (1), _SyNwah_, means
'hailstorm' for example.  And one of these words also means 'sandstorm', a
more realistic meaning since the Techian homeland was east of the Sahara and
west of Arabia for a long time.

But apparently, Tech preserves words and meanings very conservatively from
possibly as far back as the end as the Ice Age, some 15,000 years ago!

Regarding the Inuit words -- almost all of them end in -k or -q, I noticed.
I assume this is a nominative (or absolutive?) marker.  What determines
whether or not the words gets the velar or the uvular.  I'm thinking either
a remnant of a lost end vowel, since both consonants can follow any of the
three vowels (a i u).

By the way, some believe that Eskimo-Aleut is a Nostratic offshoot.  Joseph
Greenberg includes it in his Eurasian macrofamily.

DaW.
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