Re: OT: Eskimo words for snow (Re: what's a "froplet"?)
Re: OT: Eskimo words for snow (Re: what's a "froplet"?)
- Subject: Re: OT: Eskimo words for snow (Re: what's a "froplet"?)
- From: Alex Robinson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 18:09:01 +0100
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Although the Inuit language has a large vocabulary for the various kinds of
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frozen and partly frozen water (not just snow, as is commonly believed), it's
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worth remembering that English is not lacking in this area either;
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>>> CREDULOUS TRANSMISSION <<<<
From Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct"
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Speaking of anthropological canards, no discussion of language and thought
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would be complete without the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Contrary to
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popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do
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speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as has
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been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or
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even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously,
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experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would
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not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanch, hail,
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hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV
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meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.
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Where did the myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually studied the
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Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages spoken from
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Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura Martin has documented how
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the story grew like an urban legend, exaggerated with each retelling. In
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1911 Boas casually mentioned that Eskimos used four unrelated words for
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snow. Whorf embellished the count to seven and implied that there were
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more. His article was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and popular
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books on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in other
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textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.
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The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who popularized Martin's article in his essay
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"The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," speculates about why the story got so
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out of control: "The alleged lexical extravagances of the Eskimos comports
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so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity:
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rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber;
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throwing Grandma out to be eaten by polar bears." It is an ironic twist.
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Linguistic complexity came out of the Boas school, as part of a campaign to
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show that nonliterate cultures were as complex and sophisticated as
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European ones. But the supposedly mind-broadening anecdotes owe their
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appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other psychologies as weird
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and exotic compared to our own. As Pullum notes,
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Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission
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and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there *were* a
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large number of words for snow in some Arctic language, this would
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*not*, objectively speaking, be intellectually interesting; it
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would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have
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various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have
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names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of
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mauve; printers have many different names for fonts (Carlson,
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Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough ...
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Would anyone think of writing about printers the kind of slop we
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find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics books? Take [the
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following] random textbook ..., with its earnest assertion "It
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is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos ... snow is
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of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that
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correspond to one word and one thought in English into several
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distinct classes ...," Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that
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in the culture of printers ... fonts are of great enough importance
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to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and
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one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes ..."
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Utterly boring, even if true. Only the link to those legendary,
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promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the ice-packs could permit
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something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.
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