Over 100 words for snow?

[Jonathan Lighter]

When I first heard this claim in school in 1960 or '61, the number was
"twenty."

Pullum's article is based partly on the fact that since Eskimo languages are
agglutinative, the word "word" has no meaning.  However, the misconception
is hardly a "hoax" except in its deliberately misleading PR sense - which
makes me wonder if Pullum's article had its own bias.

As Wilson is fond of saying, "One never knows, do one?"  When I was told the
legend, the context was something like, "You think primitive people are
primitive, don't you? Well, class, the Eskimo language has twenty different
everyday words for kinds of snow.  Can we Americans even _distinguish_
twenty different kinds of snow?!"

Of course that was in liberal NYC, which, I take it, is not representative
of the nation at large.

Decades later I was shocked (exactly the opposite of "shocked - shocked!")
to learn that people thought the factoid meant that "the Eskimo language"
revealed its speakers as confused dullards who can't generalize to the
obvious. I still think that interpretation is by far the less common.

I kid you not.

JL


On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 1:16 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Over 100 words for snow?
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> At 2/11/2009 12:07 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
> >
> >Geoffrey Pullum has shown that this claim is utter bullshit. BTW, are
> >you merely exaggerating for effect WRT "over 100 words"?
>
> No, the source I quoted says "over a hundred".  But it's a (1987)
> book on female felony in colonial Massachusetts, so perhaps the
> author can be excused.  (She uses "snow" among "Eskimos" as an
> analogy to the terms used in Puritan Massachusetts to refer to sexual
> misconduct -- the large number indicates the significance of concern.)
>
> >  I certainly
> >hope so, because, when I first heard this claim, ca.1950, it was that
> >the Eskimaux had *eight* words for various *concrete manifestations*
> >of snow," but *no* term for the concept, "snow," in the *abstract,*
> >such as exists in the languages of all civilized people.
>
> Seriously, though, I can imagine why there might be no "Eskimo" word
> for the "abstract concept" of snow.  Snow is very important to
> "Eskimos", so "snow" would be too ambiguous.  Just like "stepgrandparent".
>
> Joel
>
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