February Album Writing Month - FAWM.ORG

Muruaneq (soft deep snow) (*22747)

jamesrdevries

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Tagged As:

snow yup ik linguistics acoustic

Challenges:

W1: The Weather

Liner Notes:

This was inspired by the Weather song challenge but it's mostly about the claim that Eskimos have a lot of words for snow since it is something that is very prominent in their world. Turns out that they don't really have many more words for snow than English does so it's a baseless claim.

"Muruaneq" is a Yup'ik word for "soft deep snow".

And linguistic relativity would take a little bit more to explain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Lyrics:

it's not how many words you have
it's how many words you need
describe snow on the ground
we'll say it's soft and deep

don't blame Franz Boas
it's not anthropology
Fraud of Sapir and Whorf
Linguistic relativity

so now I've made up my mind
on how the mind is made up
boundaries of my thoughts
are not from my native tongue

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theodamus 3 months ago

Any song that discusses the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by name is AWESOME in my book *nerdy linguist over here*. Nice, I love the guitar leaping around all over the place, works well in a song about snow.