The essential morphological question is why a language would say, for example, "lake", "river", and "brook" instead of something like "waterplace", "waterfast", and "waterslow". English has many snow-related words, [15] but Boas's intent may have been to connect differences in culture with differences in language. Reading the show’s program, with its concerns about climate change and its desire to reinstate women to their rightful place in the history of polar exploration, you can easily applaud the politics behind the project. There’s also a lot of humor in Hennessy’s writing, which has an attractive brightness, even when talking about grim issues such as funerals and grief. Although this is quite a short piece, barely 75 minutes long, there is an epic reach to its ambition. And many of the details of life in a subzero world are memorable. If some passages, about the family for example, or plane crashes, work better than others, there is a warmhearted feel to the show that can thaw any critical chilliness. After this success, I only hope that Hennessy goes on to write more and more. TH: To keep on writing plays and telling stories and working in this mad, brilliant industry for as long as I can get away with.

Review of A Hundred Words for Snow | Vault Festival London

Fortescue, Michael D.; Jacobson, Steven; Kaplan, Lawrence, eds. (2010). "PE aniɣu 'snow (fallen)' ". Comparative Eskimo Dictionary: With Aleut Cognates (2nded.). Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks. p.31. ISBN 978-1-555-00-109-4. A Hundred Words for Snow is about being an explorer in a melting world. It’s a coming of age story. With polar bears. The show has been developed with the support of the Peggy Ramsey Foundation and was a winner of the Heretic Voices Monologue Competition.Tatty Hennessy's play A Hundred Words for Snow is about being an explorer in a melting world. It's a coming-of-age story. With polar bears. Words are the stars of this show, carefully selected and crafted to create a play with real beauty, depth and heart. So much of this comes down to the joy of Barnett’s performance. Barnett is a master of comedic subtlety; her expressions are so warm, and she really grips the audience, from moments of elation and laugh-out-loud humour through to discomfort, loss and grief. We are right there with her at every turn, and the adventure feels authentically both physical and deeply emotional.

A HUNDRED WORDS FOR SNOW - crt.uconn.edu A HUNDRED WORDS FOR SNOW - crt.uconn.edu

TH: It’s terrifying! I was expecting it to be a profound experience but I wasn’t at all prepared for how it felt. The landscape is like nothing I’d ever seen before, it exists on a scale of size and time that’s so inhuman. Some of them are borrowed from other languages, like firn (German), névé (French), penitentes (Spanish) and sastrugi (Russian).The claim that Eskimo words for snow (specifically Yupik and Inuit words) are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English, is often used to support the controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis or "Whorfianism". The strongest interpretation of this hypothesis, which posits that a language's vocabulary (among other features) shapes or limits its speakers' view of the world, has been largely discredited, [1] though a 2010 study supports the core notion that these languages have many more words for snow than the English language. [2] [3] The original claim is based in the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and was particularly promoted by his contemporary, Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose name is connected with the hypothesis. [4] [5] The idea is commonly tied to larger discussions on the connections between language and thought. The first re-evaluation of the claim was by linguist Laura Martin in 1986, who traced the history of the claim and argued that its prevalence had diverted attention from serious research into linguistic relativity. A subsequent influential and humorous, and polemical, essay by Geoff Pullum repeated Martin's critique, calling the process by which the so-called "myth" was created the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". Pullum argued that the fact that the number of word roots for snow is about equally large in Eskimoan languages and English indicates that there exists no difference in the size of their respective vocabularies to define snow. Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin Island. [2] [7] It’s a bugbear of mine that so often there is an easily foreseeable ending to a plot and while I think it is pretty obvious how A Hundred Words For Snow is destined to end, I would make the point that in my opinion, the ending is good enough and individual enough that its foresee-ability should not put you off.

A Hundred Words for Snow by Tatty Hennessy | Goodreads

An often used turn of phrase is that it will ‘make you laugh, make you cry’, and very few ever do.This is no exception. You may manage not to cry, you may even find some of the puns to be unfunny, but A Hundred Words For Snow hits an emotional level that is impressive in its intensity and its range. For a charming, disarming, engaging production that is familiar and edgy simultaneously, I would certainly recommend it. People who live in an environment in which snow or different kinds of grass, for example, play an important role are more aware of the different characteristics and appearances of different kinds of snow or grass and describe them in more detail than people in other environments. It is however not meaningful to say that people who see snow or grass as often but use another language have less words to describe it if they add the same kind of descriptive information as separate words instead of as "glued-on" ( agglutinated) additions to a similar number of words. In other words, English speakers living in Alaska, for example, have no trouble describing as many different kinds of snow as Inuit speakers.

The play won the Heretic Voices Monologue Competition and was first produced at the Arcola Theatre, London, in 2018. A new production was performed at the 2018 VAULT Festival, where it was the winner of a VAULT Origins Award for outstanding new work from the VAULT Festival. It then toured the UK, with a run at the Trafalgar Studios in London's West End in 2019. Nils Jernsletten,- "Sami Traditional Terminology: Professional Terms Concerning Salmon, Reindeer and Snow", Sami Culture in a New Era: The Norwegian Sami Experience. Harald Gaski ed. Karasjok: Davvi Girji, 1997. TH: It’s already been translated into Greek and performed in Athens, which was so thrilling. It’s a play very close to my heart so of course I’d love for it to have a long life. And a few actors have got in touch with me saying they’ve used it as their audition piece for drama schools which I’m always so excited and touched by. Who knows what’s next! Later writers, prominently Roger Brown in his "Words and things" and Carol Eastman in her "Aspects of Language and Culture", inflated the figure in sensationalized stories: by 1978, the number quoted had reached fifty, and on February 9, 1984, an unsigned editorial in The New York Times gave the number as one hundred. [17] However, the linguist G. Pullum shows that Inuit and other related dialects do not possess an extraordinarily large number of terms for snow. Languages in the Inuit and Yupik language groups add suffixes to words to express the same concepts expressed in English and many other languages by means of compound words, phrases, and even entire sentences. One can create a practically unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages on any topic, not just snow, and these same concepts can be expressed in other languages using combinations of words. In general and especially in this case, it is not necessarily meaningful to compare the number of words between languages that create words in different ways due to different grammatical structures. [4] [8] [note 2]