Winter words

Early this morning, while reading "Winter--the ultimate test" in Janine Benyus' Northwoods Wildlife, I encountered a couple of word that I didn't recognize. One was a word for "snow that collects on trees;" the other, a word for "snow on ground." I was taken aback, since I grew up in New England where snow is about as common, if not as deep, as it is in the North Country where I've lived for the past several decades.

which words would you use to describe this Winter scene?

Photo by J. Harrington

Later, I undertook what I anticipated would be a simple internet search for the words in question. The search wasn't simple, but, through persistence (the Better Half calls it stubbornness), was eventually successful. I eventually found this web site and the two listed terms:

Eskimo and Northern Indian Snow Terms

api: snow on ground 

qali: snow that collects on trees 

In the process of unsuccessfully following links, I came across what I thought should be a productive source for the words being sought. But, the

Glossary of Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Terms

Encyclopedia Arctica Volume 1: Geology and Allied Subjects

included neither "api" not "qali," although the Encyclopedia does include a "Volume 8: ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY," that lists information on many peoples indigenous to the arctic, but, apparently, not their languages.

At this point, I'd established a pattern of idling time wandering around the internet playing with words, so it was serendipitous that I then came across a brainpickings posting about Nobel Laureate

Toni Morrison on the Power of Language

In it, Morrison writes

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.

We wonder how long and deep Winter would have to be in our North Country before we would find the words "api" and "qali" beneficial to our "ability to limn the actual,...." This pondering was compounded by our realization that each single word required a multi-word phrase in English to translate it.

Serendipity struck again as we then tumbled onto David Shariatmadari's

Why We Love Untranslatable Words

In which he notes:

The concept of “untranslatable words” preserves the idea that the world can never be fully mapped out and expunged of mystery.

That concept may help explain how it is that I then came upon today's brainpickings posting, entitled

What You Need to Be Warm: Neil Gaiman Reads His Humanistic Poem for Refugees, Composed from a Thousand Definitions of Warmth from Around the World

Were you aware that the World might contain "a Thousand Definitions of Warmth?" Frankly, despite my aversion to cold and ice and snow, that thought had never occurred to me. But then I never contemplated living on a world ravaged by war, poverty, and displacement of people by catastrophes attributable to our broken climate. Clearly, no matter the language in question, "the world can never be fully mapped out and expunged of mystery."

I hope you've enjoyed our Alice-In-Wonderland-like journey through the Wonderful World of Winter

Words

Dana Gioia - 1950-

The world does not need words. It articulates itself 
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path 
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being. 
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands 
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow 
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot 
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. 
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa 
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds, 
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving 
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it. 
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always-- 
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

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