At a recent Quality of Life conference that I attended, a presenter invoked the popular and false claim that “Eskimos have 50 words for snow” to illustrate how some concepts may not easily translate across languages. It is a very well-worn example, but also a flawed one: this myth was debunked and abandoned decades ago, along with the term “Eskimo”. While Inuit and Yupik languages do have multiple snow-related terms, the number is neither exceptional or unique. Many languages have rich vocabularies for what matters in their environment.

So what was the speaker’s actual point? That some words are untranslatable? That culture shapes language? Likely both, but the conclusion was left vague and it just felt like posturing: I know a clever fact. A clever fact that does not hold water. So, not a fact at all. I know a fact as well. Two, actually: Kenologophobia is the fear of empty speech, while Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words. The trouble is that they are not facts. They are invented, just like the 50 words for snow claim.

The point is that the real value of how language and culture influence each other is not in the exotic trivia, but in what these differences reveal about how people live, think and prioritise.

Take Sorani Kurdish, for example, where there are two distinct words for ‘fart’. ‘Tis’, with emphasis on the sibilant for the silent, gassy kind of fart and ‘tirr’, with a heavy trill on the ‘r’, to mimic the rat bark kind. The onomatopoeia is beautiful and appeals to the kind of mid-adolescent sense of humour that many of us men hardly move beyond. But why make this distinction, particularly in a culture where farting is taboo? Maybe it is precisely because it is taboo. Language gives form to what is socially sensitive.

Or consider ‘umarell’, a term from Bologna for a retired old man who loiters at construction sites, hands behind his back, sometimes offering unsolicited advice, but mostly just watching people work. It seems to be a growing phenomenon across southern Europe, maybe beyond. I have seen it from Locarno to Lisbon. There is no tidy English equivalent, but the concept is instantly recognisable. It is a vivid example of how language captures culturally specific, yet relatable behaviour.

Another claim, this one from Richard Lewis in When Cultures Collide (2010), is that Zulu has 38 words for green. This sounds intriguing, but this does not resonate with any of the Zulu experts that we work with. They think it is a misunderstanding of how Zulu speakers describe colours using analogies, e.g. ‘grass-like’, ‘leaf-like’, ‘crocodile-like’ and often borrows colour from other languages. Lewis’ claim most likely stems from not knowing how Bantu languages use root words with descriptive modifiers or from counting compound phrases as distinct ‘words’. And why make this claim about Zulu and not Xhosa, which is closely related?

The ”language X has Y words for Z” claims may seem like windows into linguistic diversity, but they often obscure more than they reveal. They imply that some cultures are uniquely attuned to a concept because they have more “words” for it. But this overlooks how language actually functions. Many of these “words”, such as the many Inuit words for ‘snow’ are actually only compound forms, circumlocutions or domain-specific expressions. These are devices that exist in every language.

Take snow, for instance. Yes, Inuit languages may encode distinctions like “powdery snow”, “wet snow” or “snow good for sledding” in single root words. But so can English given the right context. A skier, a mountaineer or a meteorologist might distinguish between “graupel”, “sleet”, “blizzard snow”, “drift” and “corn snow”. Frank Zappa warned us to stay away from the “yellow snow”. And presumably, a meteorologist in German, Samoan, Papiamentu or Nahuatl would have access to just as many distinctions, because expertise in any domain breeds specialised language, whether through jargon, figurative speech or compound terms.

Languages differ in how they encode information. Some embed detail within single words, while others unpack it through phrases or metaphor. English doesn’t have a single word for ‘the light filtering through the trees’ the way Japanese has ‘komorebi’, but that doesn’t mean that the concept cannot be described. What matters is not how many discrete ‘words’ a language has for a given concept, but whether it can express the same ideas.

And often, it can. Through context, analogy, creativity and cultural reference, speakers of all languages routinely convey nuance. The challenge for translators, especially in fields like Clinical Outcome Assessments (COAs), is to capture not just lexical meaning, but conceptual equivalence. That is: ensuring the idea behind the words is conveyed in a way that resonates culturally and semantically.

Even superstitions vary across language and culture. The same presenter at the conference noted that, while English speakers fear Friday the 13th as the unlucky day, in many Spanish-speaking cultures it’s Tuesday the 13th. Presumably, the presenter meant, but did not follow up by saying, that this is a reminder that the things we imbue with symbolic meaning vary and it can be arbitrary. Take the case of the albatross. In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, written within an English-speaking cultural context, killing an albatross is an ominous act that curses the ship and its crew. This was a reflection of the symbolic weight the seafarers in that tradition placed on certain animals and omens. But in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, written for a French audience just decades later, the same act carries no supernatural consequence. It is simply a narrative event, the albatross as a source of food, stripped of moral or mythic resonance. French seafarers had different taboos or omens, such as not setting sail on a Friday, which, I realise links back in an ironic way to the point raised by the conference presenter, regarding Friday 13th.

Or take idioms: in English, someone is “on cloud nine”, but in German it is “cloud seven”. The meaning is the same, the references shift because the words are arbitrary in many cases. These are examples of how three geographically, culturally and historically close cultures – English, French and German – could assign different meanings to the same concept. This underscores just how variable and local symbolic meaning can be.

Even invented phrases work. If someone says to you “I am painting my car a bubble gum pink”, you would instantly visualise a very specific shade of pink, even if you have never heard the term before. That is because language is elastic, imaginative and grounded in shared experience. Others would also conjure up a very similar shade of pink. Similarly, if we try to imagine David Bowie’s ‘blue, blue, electric blue’ in the song ‘Sound and Vision’, we have a good idea of what shade of blue he had in mind.

So, yes, I love this stuff. I revel in linguistic quirks, the peculiar turns of phrase, the unexpected gaps and overlaps between languages. These things do matter, especially when translating materials meant to measure quality of life, symptoms and outcomes. Understanding the surface-level differences is essential.

But they are just that: surface-level. The visible part of the iceberg. Cosmetic observations. Bubble gum pink. To this day, I still don’t understand what point the presenter was trying to make, apart from providing two very simple examples. What matters, especially in COA translation, is whether we are capturing the lived experience of a concept, like pain, distress or fatigue, in a way that makes sense within the patient’s cultural and linguistic framework. It is about understanding people and not cosmetic posturing. Perhaps Quality of Life conferences could focus more on these more important topics.

Invoking “50 words for snow”, a long-abandoned idea in all areas of linguistics, at a conference in the 2020s, is the equivalent of presenting miasma theory as a plausible cause of virus transmission at a modern-day virology or epidemiology conference.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, May 2025