Cold facts about foreign languages | Letters

I thoroughly enjoyed Tobias Jones’s article on bilingualism (“Two languages good”, Comment). But the claim that the Inuit people, whose language is called Inuktitut, have multiple words for “snow” needs some explanation.

There is still some controversy about this, reignited five years ago by an article in New Scientist, but the complexities of word-formation in the language mean that in reality there are possibly infinite ways of talking about snow in Inuktitut, based on a small number of lexical roots that make the same sort of distinctions as English, which also has several words in this semantic area (snow, ice, slush, sleet, flurries, snowflakes, hail, powder etc).