LogFAQs > #908950947

I'm not entirely sure about that, but I won't argue the point since, well, I'm not sure.

Well, what he did was basically collect smoke on a surface, scrape it off, and make a knife out of it. But then, at that point you might call it soot rather than smoke, so you could say that the literally is wrong.

...

I wonder. There is that whole thing about how eskimos and how many words they have for snow. I wonder which language has the most different words for "some form of physical thing a fire emits/leaves behind." English has a fair few (to name some, ash, smoke, cinders, soot). Its not like WE don't have more then one word for snow either (sleet, slush, snow, flurry, etc), but we of course don't live it in constantly (or at least, the place of origin for the English language doesn't) and so we only really need enough words to suit our purposes for the ways it matters to us.

Fire tends to be important in just about every culture though, so pinpointing which has the most words for "ash" is a bit harder than just taking surveys of every language that originated in a region that has or is near where permafrost exists.
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