{"id":49234,"date":"2020-11-20T13:00:06","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T18:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=49234"},"modified":"2020-11-20T13:00:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-20T18:00:06","slug":"no-word-for-x-meets-snowcloning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=49234","title":{"rendered":"\"No word for X\" meets snowcloning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[This is a guest post by Scott de Brestian]<\/p>\r\n<p>I am an avid Language Log reader, and so am familiar with two ongoing series that your blog has \u2013 first, the posts debunking the \u201cEskimos (or people X) have unusually many words for snow\u201d myth (which I believe drew me to your blog in the first place), and another series, on the \u201cLanguage has no word for (concept)\u201d. So I was excited when I found a quote that seems to unite these two genres, but with a twist.<\/p>\r\n<p>The quote is said to come from Allan R. Becker\u2019s <em>Problems in Desert Warfare<\/em> (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Combat Development Command, 1990), page 4 (I have not verified with the original source*):<\/p>\r\n<p>[*VHM:\u00a0 The report, no. 82-0205, is available online <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marines.mil\/portals\/1\/Publications\/FMFRP%200-58%20Problems%20in%20Desert%20Warfare.pdf?ver=2012-10-11-164057-560\">here<\/a>.\u00a0 The quote, as given below (sans ellipsis), is on pp. 3-4.]<\/p>\r\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\r\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Inhabitants of temperate zones do not appreciate the importance of water to everyday life as do the inhabitants of equatorial deserts. For example, there is no one word in the English language that means \u2018to die of thirst,\u2019 yet in Arabic there are eight degrees of thirst [\u2026] Arabs express thirst in terms of simple thirst, burning thirst, vehement thirst, burning thirst with dizziness, and lastly excessive thirst \u2013 the thirst that kills.<\/p>\r\n<p>I would be very interested to see what your correspondents make of this passage, especially those versed in Arabic.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[This is a guest post by Scott de Brestian] I am an avid Language Log reader, and so am familiar with two ongoing series that your blog has \u2013 first, the posts debunking the \u201cEskimos (or people X) have unusually many words for snow\u201d myth (which I believe drew me to your blog in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-snowclones"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49234"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49249,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49234\/revisions\/49249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}