Wikipedia: Inuktitut language/Talk

Since the following link came from an Inuit cultural center, I am inclined to take the Inuit's own word as to how they define words. For some Inuktitut words for snow, see http://www.arctic.ca/LUS/Snow%26Ice.html

My information also comes from an Inuit source: http://www.arctictravel.com/chapters/incultpage.html Here's the relevant quote:

For beginners, let's get one thing clear! Although myth has it that
there are 100 ways of saying the word "snow" in Inuktitut, there is
in fact only one word for it: aput. But just as the English language
has different terms for different conditions of snow (for example,
powdery snow, packing snow, slush, sleet), Inuktitut has different
terms for different conditions of snow, too.

I'll consult some other sources and see if I can find some sort of Inuit consensus. -- STG

The link just above refers back to an old chestnut about Inuktitut supposedly having more words for snow and ice related phenomena than any other language. This was supposed to show something about the impact of environment of culture or some such.

In fact, it showed something about urban myths and lack of linguistic sophistication. First of all, because of the properties of Inuktitut, it is difficult to distinguish what in English might be called a "word" and what might be called a "phrase". Of course, English as well as most languages have this problem as well as evidenced from the ?words? "New York" and "Europäischewirtschaftgemeinschaft".

And, for the record, languages like English that have been inundated by foreign words tend to win silly vocabulary size contests. Here is a list of English snow and ice terms.

While I am not an expert in Inuktitut, I maintain that the orginal "one word for snow" statement was correct. Here's a link with a brief article on the nature of Inuktitut: http://www.nunavut.com/nunavut99/english/our.html

I think, basically, that the above should be refactored by someone and included in Inuktitut. We should keep talk on /Talk pages and encyclopedic-type content, from the neutral point of view, on the main page. --LMS