Weather Wise

I HAVE finally lost patience with a document which I had been saving up for a snowy day. It is a publication from the Scott Polar Research Institute which was sent to me by David Reibel of the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. On an earlier occasion, Prof Reibel filled in some important gaps in my knowledge of linguistic confusion over Eskimo words for snow. Now he has generously supplied this Illustrated Glossary of Snow and Ice, which draws upon such earlier publications as the Dictionnaire francais-anglais des glaces flottantes by L-E Hamelin (Travaux de l'institut de Geographie de l'Universite Laval, 1959) to provide a complete list of terms in eight different languages for over fifty terms relating to snow and ice.

West Greenlandic, unfortunately, is not among the languages cited, but the document (written by Terence Armstrong, Brian Roberts and Charles Swithinbank) shows that if you are prepared to dig deeply enough there is no shortage of words for ice in any of the languages cited.

As I said, I was waiting for a snowy day to use this material, but the forecasters have been predicting sleet (or ranta, as they say in Finland) for so long now without my spotting a single snowflake (Norwegian: snoflak; Danish: snefnug) that I can wait no longer.

What comes through most strongly from this glossary is the lack of linguistic imagination of the Spaniards (or to be more precise the Argentinians, since it is their more snow-rich form of Spanish which is used here) and the utter perversity of Icelanders. For example, a rocky crag or small mountain projecting from a glacier is called, in English, by the borrowed term "nunatak". The Danes, French, Germans, Norwegians, Spanish and even the Russians call it "nunatak" (though the latter transliterate it into Cyrillic before doing so). And what do the Icelanders call a nunatak? They call it Jokulsker.

In English, Danish, French, German, and Norwegian, a wave or band on the surface of a valley glacier is called "ogive". The Spanish vary only a little in calling it ojiva, the Russians say ogiv, but the Icelanders are again quite out of step with skari, which is, I believe, in English a name for one of the Spice Girls. Some of the terms in English, incidentally, offer a ready-made set of names for any group wanting to call themselves the Ice Girls: Anchor Ice, Brash Ice, Dead Ice, Fast Ice and the sensible one of the group, Level Ice.

Talking of being Skari, it is interesting to note that the Danes and Norwegians have no word for "hostile ice" - which shows that it takes more than a chunk of ice to scare them. Actually, neither of them has a word for "friendly ice" either, suggesting that they just take all ice as it comes. Or it could be a sign that neither Denmark nor Norway is very well endowed with submarines, since both friendly and hostile ice refer to the ice canopy as viewed from beneath by a submariner. They don't have a word for "bummock" either - a submerged hummock of ice. If it is a question of willingness to face danger, the Danes win the overall prize, since theirs is the only language without any word for "anti-icing" - the prevention of ice accumulation on ships and planes, which the Russians take so seriously they call it predotvrashenie obledeneniya.

The Spaniards seem ill at ease with snow and ice terms, using rather cumbersome circumlocutions rather than inventing new words of their own. Where the English have the romantic term "snowflake" (Da: snefnug; Ic: snjflygsa; No: snoflak), the Spanish settle for copo de nieve, and their slush (Da: Snesjap; Fi: Sohjo; No: snosorpe;) is nieve pastosa.