Returning to “snow” in cold places, we should first replace “Eskimo” with more accurate terms for the people, Inuit, and their language, Inuktitut. According to Martin (1986), the Inuit of West Greenland have only two basic words for “snow” (qanik, “snow in the air,” and aput, “snow on the ground”). From these two basic elements, they are able to create a large number of common expressions for different snow-related phenomena. Yet, there seems to be no compelling reason to suppose that those expressions are controlling vision or thought among their users. Some expressions will occur frequently in the context of habitual experiences, but it is the human who is thinking about the experience and determining what will be expressed, not the language.

English does lexicalize some conceptual distinctions in the area of “snow,” with sleet, slush and snowflake as examples. However, English speakers can also create expressions, by manipulating their language, to refer to fresh snow, powdery snow, spring snow or the dirty stuff that is piled up on the side of the street after the snowplough has gone through. These may be categories of snow for English speakers, but they are non-lexicalized (“not expressed as a single word”). English speakers can express category variation by making a distinction using lexicalized categories (It’s more like slush than snow outside) and also by indicating special reference using non-lexicalized distinctions (We decorated the windows with some fake plastic snow stuff), but most of them have a very different view of “snow” from the average speaker of Inuktitut.

Just as speakers of Inuktitut, in their traditional way of life, developed a set of common expressions to talk about “snow,” so the speakers of Tuvaluan (in the central Pacific) developed many expressions for different types of “coconut.” In Hawai’i, the traditional language had a very large number of expressions for different kinds of “rain.” Contemporary English seems to have a lot of expressions having to do with “money.” Our languages reflect our concerns.

We inherit a language used to report knowledge, so we would expect that language to influence the organization of our knowledge in some way. However, we also inherit the ability to manipulate and be creative with that language in order to express our perceptions. When the Hopi borrowed the word santi (“Sunday”) from English speaking missionaries, they used it to refer to the period beginning with one santi and ending with the next santi, essentially developing their own concept of our “week.” If thinking and perception were totally determined by language, then the concept of language change would be impossible. If a young Hopi girl had no word in her language for the object known to us as a computer, would she fail to perceive the object? Would she be unable to think about it? What the Hopi girl can do when she encounters a new entity is change her language to accommodate the need to refer to the new entity. The human manipulates the language, not the other way round.