Photo by CLAUDIA DEA
By Debbin Gin
They say that you can tell a lot about a community by the number of different words the community has for something: the greater the variety, the greater the importance of that something. For example, where residents of warmer climates use only “snow” or “ice” to describe frozen water, the Inuit people and other native Alaskans choose from a couple dozen words, depending on the particular nuance needed for the context. Koreans have at least three words to refer to the English “hot” (dhupdah — weather-hot, mepdah — spicy-hot, and ddughupdah — hot-to-touch in English) and at least a half dozen different words just to state something is “spicy hot.” (more…)
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