salogok

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we?

This week’s word is salogok. An Eskimo word meaning ‘young black ice’. No doubt that if you’ve spoken to others about how varied languages are, the example of the famous seventeen words Eskimos have for snow will come up. And that does make a lot of sense. Inhabitants of the Arctic regions would have a lot to say about snow, wouldn’t they?

But like many cross-cultural legends and stereotypes, the truth is different from the common wisdom. The first surprise is that while there are plenty of words for snow, the real linguistic action in the Eskimo language is in the category of ‘ice’. The second surprise is that the number of words for ice is much closer to 170 than seventeen.

Salogok is one of the few ‘ice’ words that most people in the mainland US can experience on an early winter morning. As opposed to other words that would only refer to ice that exists in the extreme weather of Alaska or Northern Canada. Salogok is the thin, non reflective membrane of young ice. Something many a dog walker or commuter in a car would want to avoid altogether. Especially since salogok can’t support the weight of a man. And seals can easily break their heads through it in order to breathe.

An ethnographer named Richard K. Nelson wrote a book on Eskimo, called “Hunters of the Northern Ice”. Its appendix is all about sea-ice terminology and has roughly 10 words for ice age or thickness, 16 words for various conditions and states of ice movement, 50 words for sea-ice topography, and 7 words for related sea-ice phenomena. 

Wouldn’t it be fun if residents of Los Angeles someday had the need for multiple words to describe freeway traffic conditions? Or perhaps the subway commuters of Tokyo or New York will develop a shared vocabulary to describe the various states of discomfort in jam-packed cars? 

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!