In the guessing thread I already alluded to the possibility that dwarves will have many names for things being inevitable. ;^) (I don't think "It was inevitable" is ever going to get old... it achieved instant mimetic status not unlike the killer carp, completely intolerable nobles, or the dwarven obsession with cheese; like them, it will probably be fondly remembered well beyond the era when it was dominant.)
As I understand it, what makes the "[northern-bound culture here] have [surprisingly large number here] words for snow!" thing a myth isn't so much that it isn't literally true as that people mistakenly think it's completely different from the surprising number of snow-related words used by any non-tropics-bound culture. In English, for example, we have snowing vs. flurries vs. blizzards, snowbanks vs. snowdrifts, snowflakes vs. "ice crystals" (sometimes synonymous and sometimes not), frost and some variations thereon, slush when the stuff is half melted... and probably more that I'm forgetting. Now, granted, we don't have individual words for light snow vs. heavy snow, dry snow vs. wet snow (short of slush), pure white snow vs. dirty street snow vs. yellow snow... but only because we don't do compound words much in modern English.
On the other hand, cultures do have interesting words for specific, nuanced things like "the way snowbanks made of unadulterated fluffy snow shimmer in the sunlight". Even if they don't have such words in relation to snow, they have some in relation to something. And that, really, might be more interesting to come up with some stock examples to demonstrate than the mere number of words that can be had for a given thing in varied contexts.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1880678 times)