Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'

Extent and nature of “many words for X”

• Multiple commenters note that English and other familiar languages already have many distinct terms for snow, especially among skiers, mountaineers, and people from snowy regions (powder, crust, firn, slush, hardpack, etc.).
• Similar points are made for other domains: English “love” has many near‑synonyms and phrases; British English has many rain words; hackers have hundreds of words for “broken”; Italian has vast pasta vocabulary.
• The common rebuttal: it’s not that other languages can’t express these distinctions, but some use single words where English uses multi‑word phrases.

Inuit snow vocabulary and polysynthetic languages

• The original “100 Eskimo words for snow” claim is traced back to a much smaller set (e.g., four roots in early work), then inflated via retelling.
• Lists of Inuit snow‑related terms are shared, but several people emphasize the key technical point: in polysynthetic, highly agglutinative languages, counting “words” is meaningless because you can build unbounded compounds from a small root set.
• This same issue arises in Germanic and Scandinavian compounds and is cited as a major flaw in naive “word counting” across languages.

The new “lexical elaboration” study

• The study’s method—counting how much bilingual dictionary space a concept takes up—is seen as interesting but shallow.
• Critiques:
  • Bilingual dictionaries are biased by compilers’ expectations (e.g., if a language is famous for “snow words,” lexicographers over‑list them).
  • Dictionaries mix parts of speech, abbreviations, transliterations, and rare synonyms, inflating counts in inconsistent ways.
  • The online exploration tool visibly shows such artifacts in multiple languages.
• Several commenters argue the headline claim of “proof” and “sweeping pattern” is far stronger than the cautious language of the original paper.

Language, culture, and cognition (Sapir–Whorf)

• Many see the robust direction as “culture/experience → lexical elaboration,” not strong Whorfian “language limits thought.”
• Others argue for mutual influence: language can narrow or nuance how time, causality, and obligation are expressed, potentially impacting habitual reasoning.
• Anecdotes from bilinguals describe different “personalities” or emotional states in different languages, and research is mentioned where native vs non‑native phonemes recruit different brain areas.
• Overall sentiment: localized, subtle effects of language on cognition are plausible; broad, deterministic claims remain unconvincing, and the article is criticized for overselling modest findings.