Conference thebay::joyoflex

    When I was in the Phillipenes on a consulting contract I learned that
    the President traditionally gives a rare fruit to every child at
    Xmas... an apple.  "What Kind?" I asked (knowing taste and texture of
    at least 15 varieties from this region.)  They looked back and said "An
    APPLE".
    
    I then  went to a local market and asked for bananas... "What kind?"
    the vendor asked.  :^(
    
    

    I recently saw a list of the twenty or forty words in Eskimo that mean
    "snow," and the list gave the English translations.

    If you think about it, though, English has a lot of words for snow too,
    for example: slush, sleet, powder, drift, etc.

    So, while Eskimo may have a whole avalanche of words for snow, we haven't
    been left out in the cold either.

    - Jim

    I think Eskimos have hundreds of PHRASES for kinds of snow, just as
    some other languages do, but phrases compound into words as in German
    or Japanese.
    
    Side topic:
    Did I read correctly that someone was living in a country and didn't
    learn to spell its name?
    
    -- Norman Diamond

    English is supposedly unusual for the number of words that describe the
    type and quality of light.
    
    There was the reporter sent by an English newspaper to China just
    before the trouble in Tianamen Square.  He had phoned his office and
    they asked him about the trouble, and was told to investigate it.
    
    "Where is it?"
    "Tianamen Square, Beijing"
    "Right, but I'm in Peking at the moment. How far is Beijing?"
    
    Nick

    People always cite the snow one, but what I find more interesting
    is languages that use a word to refer to a phenomenon that is
    recognized in English but doesn't have its own word - for example,
    the American Indian language (Nootka, I think, but I could be wrong)
    that declines a noun according to what it's doing: so that a stone
    falling is distinct from a stone being thrown.
    
    Incidentally, the other day I was thinking of the reverse of .0
    (where English has several words for another language's one); I was
    listening at the time to Celeste Aida - does that mean `celestial'
    or `heavenly' or a bit of both? Given Egyptian religious beliefs,
    perhaps calling Aida `celeste' was blasphemous (which maybe Verdi
    knew). There's so much to think about it's a wonder we get any work
    done.
    
    b

    Amour (or something like that) Romantic Love
    
    Larry
    

    In the Pacific Northwest, we have many different words for 'rain.'  :?)

    Actually, this is a lot more common than you may realize.  If you go
    into any specialty, you'll find that it has a specialized vocabulary
    that is much more extensive than the general language.  Now that
    specialized vocabulary may use existing words with distinct meanings,
    or it may create new words to describe specific items.
    
    One example: stagecraft, and one of its subset topics, tying things.
    
    General: If you want to tie two things together, what do you use?  
    A knot. 
    
    However, depending on what you're doing, you might use a sheep shank,
    clove hitch, bowline, or some other knot.
    
    What do you use to illuminate something?  A light.  But onstage it
    could be a 6" fresnel, 8" fresnel, 6 by 9 leko, 6 by 12 leko, PAR 40,
    a 1K, a deuce, and so on and on.
    
    Other specialties: if you talk to a riding enthusiast, you'd find out
    that there's a name for each item and piece of what we call riding
    tackle.
    
    What swims in a lake? Fish.  Talk to a fisherman, and you'll hear about
    pickerel, bass, walleye, sunnies, ad infinitum.  Ask about what's in the
    box, and you'll hear about spinners, and bobs, and sinkers, and so on...
    
    Forty (or eighty, or one hundred) names for snow isn't all that unusual
    -- it's simply a specialized vocabulary for those who need that level
    of precision.  And that's what a specialized vocabulary provides: more
    precision.

    I don't know about any other readers, but MY first reaction was...
    
    ``This from the person who knows only ONE word for "container"!!??!!''
    
                                       => BOX => BOX => BOX => BOX .............
    :-)
    

    A group of us have camped together for 15 years at the same location
    and we have developed maybe 15 to 20 words for firewood:
    
    	poles - skinny dry spruce with the bark on
    	lumber - chunks of spruce that smell and look like nice yellow 
                 lumber when you split it
    	hollywood - very pretty and good flames
        cellulose - rotten, but if you can pick it up at all you can toss
    		    it on a big fire
    	he-man - big, but light from rot, so you can wave it around like a 
    		 he-man
    	he-boy - small, but light from rot, so you can wave it around like
    		 a he-boy
    
    Most of these started as jokes, but they have precise meanings to four
    or five people.
    

    Very funny!
    
    					andrew

    G'day,
     re .9...
    
    A sheepshank is not a knot. It is at best, a bend. A clove hitch is not a
    knot - it is, as its name suggests - a hitch, along with a highwayman's,
    truckies and marline spike.
    
    A knot is a device that puts a permanent (until undone) kink (for want
    of a better word) in a rope in such a way that it cannot be undone
    without freeing at least one end. A hitch connects a rope to something
    else, like a spar. A bend joins one rope to another, as in carrick bend
    or sheet bend. 
    
    There are multiple versions of a bowline - single, double, triple,
    water, spanish, locked and on a bight. All put loops in a rope in some
    way or another.
    
    A fisherman's bend is not the same as a fisherman's knot, which
    strictly is a bend, but which uses two knots to join a rope. To further
    confuse, a fisherman's bend, is also called an anchor knot - probably
    because it is a permanent hitch.
    
    
    just wanted to be clear about knots.....
    
    derek
    

    >just wanted to be clear about knots.....
    
    Oh, you made it very clear     ...KNOT!

    G'day,
    
    
    re.14...
    
    I hope that came with a smiley face.....  Didn't want to appear
    supercillious or know-it-all..... but love working with knots..
    favourite book...Ashley's Book of knots - over 3000 of them Wonderful!
    (if you include hitches, bends, splices and sennets as knots)
    
    re-.15... QED? I'm sure I now knot what you mean...
    
    
    derek
    

    Concerning the innumerable (constantly increasing) Eskimo 
    words for snow, a friend told me about a linguistic article
    about the Great Eskimo Hoax. He said he'd try to find the
    article, but quoted it as proving the Eskimo thing as a myth.
    
    If he sends me the article, I'll bring you a summary, unless
    other noters know it already.
    
    Henrik

    Once uppon a time when I was still a school boy our home work was
    collecting synonyms for mooving from point A to B. (Only verbs were
    accepted.) We collected two but a hundred ones. Of course all of them
    had a slightly different meaning.
    Hungarian language doesn't have the flexibility of English (I mean
    practically unlimited usage of adjectives and nouns as verbs and
    vica versa) but is told to have an extremely reach set (over 300k)
    of words.  
    
    GyJ