Editing Inuit languages (section)

=== Words for snow ===
{{further|Eskimo words for snow}}

A popular belief exists that the Inuit have an unusually large number of words for [[snow]]. This is not accurate, and results from a misunderstanding of the nature of polysynthetic languages. In fact, the Inuit have only a few base roots for snow: 'qanniq-' ('qanik-' in some dialects), which is used most often like the verb ''to snow'', and 'aput', which means ''snow'' as a substance. Parts of speech work very differently in the Inuit language than in English, so these definitions are somewhat misleading.

The Inuit languages can form very long words by adding more and more descriptive affixes to words. Those affixes may modify the syntactic and semantic properties of the base word, or may add qualifiers to it in much the same way that English uses adjectives or prepositional phrases to qualify nouns (e.g. "falling snow", "blowing snow", "snow on the ground", "snow drift", etc.)

The "fact" that there are many Inuit words for snow has been put forward so often that it has become a [[Snowclone|journalistic cliché]].<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Tahaz-0F6zMC |title=The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language |author=Geoffrey K. Pullum |publisher=University Of Chicago Press |pages=236 |isbn=0-226-68534-9 |year=1991 |access-date=2012-02-20}}</ref>