Eskimo`snow' words myth: Pullum says 'progress'

Wed Jan 17 14:46:03 UTC 2007

Now, surely, all careless and misinformed repetition of this pernicious myth
will come to a complete and abrupt halt.

Nathan

Nathan Bierma
"On Language"
www.nbierma.com/language

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Hell will freeze over before Eskimo `snow' myth melts
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By Nathan Bierma
January 17, 2007

One of the most influential linguistic urban legends of all time is the idea
that Eskimos have an unusually high number of words for "snow." In truth, Inuit
and Yupik language families (there is no one "Eskimo language") don't have many
more terms for snow than other languages do.

Now, after nearly 20 years of dogged debunking, linguist Geoffrey Pullum has
posted "The Snow Words Myth: Progress At Last," on Language Log
(www.languagelog.org) a blog where he and a group of academic linguists
sound off on the news of the day.

A friend recently sent Pullum, a professor at the University of California at
Santa Cruz, an article called "Snow Words" from the Holland Herald, the
in-flight magazine of KLM airlines, which tried to set the record straight:
"The idea that Inuit people have many more words for snow than English speakers
is a myth," the article said.

Some of the article's grammatical explanations weren't quite right, Pullum
said, but "It was a lot closer to being accurate than the familiar nonsense
that has been repeated so many times," he wrote on Language Log.

The truth is out there, and it has been since at least 1986, when linguistic
anthropologist Laura Martin wrote an article in the journal American
Anthropologist called "Eskimo Words for Snow." She argued that anthropologists
were throwing around all kinds of figures for the number of words Eskimos
supposedly had for snow without any facts to back them up.

Martin traced the Eskimo-vocabulary myth back to 1911, when Franz Boas wrote
in his "Handbook of American Indians" that Eskimo languages had four unrelated
terms for snow: "aput," meaning "snow on the ground"; "qana," for "falling
snow"; "piqsirpoq," for "drifting snow"; and "qimuqsuq," for "snow drift."

Boas' point was simply that languages can have words with similar meanings but
different etymologies -- the same way the English words "liquid," "river," and
"dew" appear unrelated in origin but all mean something like "water."

So far, no big deal. But then came legendary linguist Benjamin Whorf in the
mid-20th Century.

Whorf's source isn't clear, but he probably had Boaz's book in mind when he
wrote in 1940, "We have the same word for [different kinds of] snow. ... To an
Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be unthinkable." Inexplicably, Whorf
claimed there were at least seven Eskimo words for snow.

The Eskimo example was incidental to Whorf, but linguists and anthropologists
seized on it as a primary example of Whorf's influential theory that the way we
think and look at the world around us is influenced in part by the words our
native language gives us. They taught that Eskimos see the world differently
than the rest of the non-arctic world does -- you can tell by all those terms
for snow in their language.

Martin wrote in her 1986 article that the Eskimo example "has transcended its
source and become part of academic oral tradition."

Martin found a 1978 play that said the Eskimos had 50 words for snow and a New
York Times editorial that said there were 100 such Eskimo words. I've found
media references as high as "a zillion."

"It sort of pumped its way up into being a remarkable factoid through a series
of popularizations uncritically embellishing each other," Geoffrey Pullum
writes by e-mail.

Pullum was already furious about Eskimo misinformation in 1989, when he
explained Martin's research in his column in the journal Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory. In 1991, the University of Chicago Press included the
article in a collection of Pullum's essays published as "The Great Eskimo
Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language"
(University of Chicago Press, 246 pages, paperback, $27).

"The truth," Pullum wrote in "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," "is that the
Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows
anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families
of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said
they do."

The number of root words for "snow" in Inuit and Yupik languages is about four
or five, Pullum says -- no more than English (which has "snow," "sleet,"
"slush," "powder," and "blizzard," to name a few).

What's more, trying to count the exact number of words for any term in those
languages is pointless, because Inuit and Yupik languages are "polysynthetic,"
meaning they can take a small number of roots and, with several endings, build
countless words on any subject.

"Eskimoan languages are really extraordinary in their productive word-building
capability, for any root you might pick," wrote Pullum at Language Log. "But
that very fact makes them exactly the wrong sort of language to ask
vocabulary-size questions about, because those questions are virtually
meaningless -- unless you ask them about basic non-derived roots, in which case
the answers aren't particularly newsworthy."

Things are looking brighter to Pullum after seeing the Holland Herald article
earlier this month that helped set the record straight. But he's still cautious
about the long-term prospects of debunking the Eskimo vocabulary myth.

"To a modest extent, things have improved a bit," Pullum wrote me by e-mail.
But he added, "I think there is a very rational reason for pessimism, and it is
this. Once a myth or legend establishes a useful role for itself, it starts to
spread faster than scientists can write and publish corrections or
criticisms."

Pullum concluded: "I imagine it will spread forever -- the number of people
who know it is false (though that number is growing) will never outstrip the
number of people who believe it is true."

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Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage at gmail.com
Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0701160310jan17,1,6486892.story

*To read Geoffrey Pullum's blog post "The Snow Words Myth: Progress at Last,"
go to http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004003.html.

Nathan Bierma writes the weekly "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune.
He is also contributing editor to Books & Culture magazine, and has taught
writing at Calvin College, where he works as communications and research
coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. His website is
www.nbierma.com.

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