Over 100 words for snow?

[Wilson Gray]

Interesting. From bad to good to bad to good, again, perhaps.

I wonder what the number of words was, to begin with. I don't recall
exactly where I read "my" version, but the author presented it as,
"though this may be news to you outsiders, everyone in the field is
aware of this, of course," and not as "behold my amazing discovery!"

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Over 100 words for snow?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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>> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>> Subject:      Re: Over 100 words for snow?
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> 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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