Here’s some fascinating linguistic analysis, about the diversity of terms tied to the depth of experience. One might even say it’s common sense, but now we have a quantitative proof.

In a sweeping new computational analysis of world languages, researchers not only confirmed the emphasis on snow in the Inuit language Inuktitut but also uncovered many similar patterns: what snow is to the Inuit, lava is to Samoans and oatmeal to Scots. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA in April.