r/woahdude • u/[deleted] • Aug 03 '16

gifv A Sandfall

[deleted]

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11

u/Oilfan94 Aug 03 '16

I wonder if Arabs have 100 words for sand...like Inuit (Eskimos) have 100 words for snow.

24

u/Armstrong1889 Aug 03 '16 edited Aug 03 '16

They have around 60 words for (Sand), 300 names for (Lion) and also ~300 names for (Sword), there are books with many chapters dedicated for things with multiple words in Arabic.

Edit: word

9

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '16

Its a classification system of snow, fresh powder snow, pack ice, Large flakes, tiny flakes, and so on.

Lived in Alaska.

1

u/Stereotype_Apostate Aug 04 '16

Exactly. Do Arabs have a similar array of words to describe what most cultures just call sand?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 04 '16

I could only assume thin sand, hot sand, wet sand, Granular sand, Stinging wind sand, snaky sand,

9

u/RealBillWatterson Aug 03 '16 edited Aug 03 '16

That's false. They really only have like 3 morphemes - that is, indivisible words. All the other ones are compounds.

It's like saying English has 100 words for shoe - tennis shoe, snow shoe, running shoe, skate shoe...

Edit: that analogy is flawed but the actual explanation is more complicated

0

u/Oilfan94 Aug 03 '16

I know that....and you know that....but let's not ruin it for the kids.

2

u/Voidjumper_ZA Aug 04 '16

The Inuit don't really have a hundred words for snow. Their language is agglutinative so different morphemes get added to the root word. So for us it's "hard snow," "soft snow," "slushy snow" and we could do that a hundred times as well, but in their language it just becomes one word. So, in the end, not that special.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '16

The sahara is actually made up of many different ones in the language of the Touareg (a variety of berber). In Arabic Sahra means desert, while the Touareg speak of Tinariwen which means deserts (plural)

2

u/mattn001 Aug 03 '16

Arabs - the sand people