linguistics1-6  Exercise 3: Carving Up the World
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Part 1: Kinship, English compared with Hungarian (one possible answer)

  Maps one to one:
    mother    anya
    father    apa
    cousin    unokatestvér   (both words are neutral about sex; the Hungarian
                              is built as "grandchild-sibling")

  Does not map one to one:
    brother   ->  báty (older brother) OR öcs (younger brother)
    sister    ->  nővér (older sister) OR húg (younger sister)

  So Hungarian forces you to say whether a brother or sister is older or
  younger, while English lets you say nothing about it. Going the other way,
  English "uncle" covers four kinds of relative that Mandarin names with
  separate words (father's older brother, father's younger brother, mother's
  brother and the husbands of aunts), so English is the language that
  lumps them together.

(Your own answer may use colour or another language; the point is to find
words that do not line up neatly, and to notice which language forces the
speaker to make which distinction.)

Part 2: "Inuit have a hundred words for snow" (four sentences)

  The claim is misleading. Inuit-Yupik languages build very long words from
  a root plus many endings, so counting "words" depends on how you count:
  one root for snow can combine with many endings to make many different
  word forms, much as Hungarian builds házaimban from ház (Chapter 4).
  English also has many snow words (snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, powder,
  flurry), and any group of people has more words for what matters in its
  daily life. The fact shows what speakers talk about, not that their minds
  work differently.