The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Language
 eskimo words for snow more




From: york@mbcrr.dfci.harvard.edu (Ian A. York)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.cecil-adams,alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Words for Snow
Date: 25 Sep 1995 20:41:32 GMT

In article <1995Sep23.102856.104170@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, Bill Kinnersley <billk@cs.ukans.edu> wrote: >
>is polysynthetic. Got nothing to do with that. Eskimos have so many
>words for snow and ice because they WANT to. It's the way their minds work.

(Note for readers of afu, to which this is now being crossposted for the first time, for obvious reasons. Bill has been defending his position - that Eskimos have a megaboss number of words for snow because their minds work differently than thse of English speakers - with vigour and enthusiasm scarcely diminished by the fact that he apparently has no idea of what he's talking about. He's cited a whole bunch of 'words' for snow taken from (somewhere: if there was a cite for his source, I missed it, but I assume it's some kind of Inuit/English dictionary? If so, Bill, I hope you kept the receipt. Or perhaps a newspaper article?) which - snipped here - look to most of the rest of the world like compound words built out of just a few roots. Cindy Kandolf and others have been trying to get his attention by smacking his nose with rolled-up newspapers, but he still persists in his position.

Having given that capsule summary of The Story So Far, I add this series of nested citations which firmly and authoritatively support Cindy and devastate Bill's special pleading.

The main text is Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language. William Morrow and Company Inc., New York, 1994. (Pinker is professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.)

In it he cites: Pullum, G.K. 1991. The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of languages. CHicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Pullum essay is in turn based on Martin, L. 1986. "Eskimo words for snow": A case study in the genesis and decay of an anthropological example. American Anthropologist, 88:418-423

And now, on with the show -)

--begin quotation--

Speaking of anthropological canards, no discussion of language and thought would be complete without the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanch, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.

Where did the myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually studied the Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages spoken from Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura Martin has documented how the story grew like an urban legend, exaggerated with each retelling. In 1911 Boas casually mentioned that Eskimos used four unrelated words for snow. Whorf embellished the count to seven and implied that there were more. His article was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and popular books on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in other textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who popularized Martin's article in his essay "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," speculates about why the story got so out of control: "The alleged lexical extravagances of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwing Grandma out to be eaten by polar bears." It is an ironic twist. Linguistic complexity came out of the Boas school, as part of a campaign to show that nonliterate cultures were as complex and sophisticated as European ones. But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own. As Pullman notes, 

        Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission 
        and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there *were* a 
        large number of words for snow in some Arctic language, this would 
        *not*, objectively speaking, be intellectually interesting; it 
        would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact.  Horsebreeders have 
        various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have 
        names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of 
        mauve; printers have many different names for fonts (Carlson, 
        Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough ... 
        Would anyone think of writing about printers the kind of slop we 
        find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics books?  Take [the 
        following] random textbook ..., with its earnest assertion "It 
        is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos ... snow is 
        of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that 
        correspond to one word and one thought in English into several 
        distinct classes ...,"  Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that 
        in the culture of printers ... fonts are of great enough importance 
        to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and 
        one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes ..."  
        Utterly boring, even if true.  Only the link to those legendary, 
        promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the ice-packs could permit 
        something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.

Ian "hoping that Pinker won't break my kneecaps: fair use, fair use!" York


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