Talk:Eskimo words for snow

Zulu green

I don't think we should include the info about Richard Lewis' claims about Zulu words for Green. These are unrelated issues and including it here borders on synthesis. The fact that the hundred eskimo words for snow is no longer considered to be true does not lead to the conclusion that other claims about exotic differences in vocabulary in other languages are also false - those claims must be investigated separately. In short untill a study exposes Lewis' claims about Zulu green as false there is no reason to suppose that they are. And even then it will have no bearings on the eskimo snow issue.·Maunus·ƛ· 19:31, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Limits

The article states

"One can create an unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages"

and a footnote quotes a reference saying

"the number of distinct words you can derive from them is [...] simply unbounded"

That is nonsense. The number of derivable words is limited by the number of components that are available to be combined, and the number of ways in which they can be combined. Suppose the language has 100000 words, and 10000 suffixes. Indeed the number of compound words that may be derived could be massive. But it cannot be "unlimited" unless you permit the genesis of entirely new components. The quotation may stand verbatim (although it can be criticised, it cannot be altered), however the article should strictly say

"One can create a practically unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages"

—DIV (138.194.12.32 (talk) 08:45, 6 August 2010 (UTC))

That's not true; the number of sentences in English is not limited by the number of words that are available to be combined. "I believed I can fly" means something different from "I believed I believed I can fly", and each time "I believed" is prepended it means something different. Or "That person is evil and that person is evil." can be expanded by the addition of "and that person is evil" indefinitely. I believe likewise the Aleut languages are flexible enough to extend the words indefinitely with a finite number of compounds.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:27, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

He's right.81.178.144.246 (talk) 14:35, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

what?

this article is a bit confusing. and one of the citations is just a note saying the ice is a word for snow, and implying that pack snow is a name for snow. How does rearranging sentences create new words? I think part of this article is poorly exploring some complex grammatical concepts. Really it should be basic. There should be two parts, the urban legend, and the actual Eskimo words for snow. The second part requires a knowledge of a second language, so I will focus on the first. The urban legend, has variants with the number of words between 7 and 100 (maybe more?). This should be mentioned in the lead. Since this legend seems to have a clear origin, we can know what language is meant by Eskimo. The veracity of the legend can be measured two ways, does an Eskimo language have X number of words for snow, or does an Eskimo language have an unusually large number of words for snow. 98.206.155.53 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 10:44, 14 March 2011 (UTC).

Confusing original research

This article is a chaotic concoction of various citation and mixing of concepts.

The very first sentence is bullshit. Inuit does have many words for different kinds of snow which are absent in English and this is recognized by "boreal science". (So do some other languages. So what? So is with some other words, so what? I don't know about colors of green in some Mwembe language, but I suggest you to open a several textile catalogs from different manufacturers, and you will find huhdreds, no joke, English words for red, shades of.) Yes, it is an urban legend that Esquimo have "hundreds" of words for snow. But the article with this title must focus on the fact and not on a legend (which of course deserves some place in wikipedia, but in a reasonable degree). I will take some time and write something factual and less sensationalist. Lom Konkreta (talk) 23:55, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I have read with interest angry diatribes bashing stupid professors who teach naive students about this exotic Esqimo. The writers fail to recognize that this is but a metaphor for the common phenomenon of terminological specialization. I may compare with my own experience. Long time ago, as a teenager, I've learned an english say "A cat may look at a king". It hit me as completely stupid trivia. Yes, a cat can, but a dog can as well, and a frog, too. A pidgeon can not only look, but even shit at a king! What is so special in cats? For a week I was going around the school telling everybody how stupid these English are. The same goes here. For some reason Esqimos with their snow struck the chord in people's brains. Lom Konkreta (talk) 00:43, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Google search shows that people really have fun with it, despite protests of select "Esqimo snow purists". I am sure you will like the following excerpt, regardless it being true or parody:

• Qanuk: snowflake
• Quinaya: snow mixed with Husky poo
• Quinyaya: snow mixed with the poo of a lead dog

And the number of snow words grows, even in English language. I've seen proposals in "snow science" to borrow missing terms for snow from other languages into English. It is a well-known fact of science that to investigate a phenomenon in deep, you must have a good term for it. And in articles about ecologies of boreal forests it is much more convenient to use the word qamaniq rather than "depression in the fluffy snow characteristic for dense forests around the base of a tree". (And you will be surprized to learn about the importance of qamaniq in ecology.)

So, in a way one sentence in the current article is unwittingly correct: English language does have at least the same number of words for snow as Esqimo! But this is not because the "Esqimo snowword counters" are stupid, rather vice versa. Lom Konkreta (talk) 00:43, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

dodgy ref

Ref 3 in the intro links to this which says (on page 56) that there 'are hundreds of types of snow for which Sami words exist'. That's not the same as the intro's phrasing: "the European Sami People, an indigenous circumpolar group, do have hundreds of words for snow". To me, there seems to be a slight yet important discrepancy. Also, the article cited isn't exactly written in a 'scientific' way. It's the equivalent of a magazine article. Don't we want something more reliable for the intro?

Sami is the same

--quote-- In contrast, the European Sami People, an indigenous circumpolar group, do have hundreds of words for snow. http://scandinavian.wisc.edu The Sami Language Department of Scandinavian Studies - The University of Wisconsin-Madison retrieved 4/18/2011 / ACIA 2005, Artic Climate Impact Assessment, Cambridge University Press, pp 973 "The Sami recognize about 300 different qualities of snow and winter pasture - each defined by a separate word in their language." --unquote--

No, no, no! These references repeat exactly the same factoid so thoroughly debunked for Eskimos. Sami languages are also agglutinative, so that words are formed in exactly the same basis as Eskimo-Aleut languages: as a concatenation of multiple suffixes that are not "words" in the English sense. 86.143.209.131 (talk) 19:14, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

As of now, it has not been debunked by scholars for the Sami language, in fact, scholars support the notion. In English, you can look here: "In the list presented by Jernsletten, there are 175-180 basic stems on snow and ice." This paper by Dr. Ole Henrik Magga has a list of WORDS, so you can argue that "skárta" and "skáva" have the same stem. But the work by Jernsletten is based on stems, not words. That's over 100 word stems around snow and ice. (Jernsletten, N. 1994: Tradisjonell samisk fagterminologi. Festskrift til Ørnulf Vorren. Tromsø Museums skrifter XXV. Tromsø: Tromsø Museum/Universitetet i Tromsø.) Denaar (talk) 04:50, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Let me just point out that while the Sami languages were originally (more precisely, Proto-Sami was) indeed agglutinative – though they have developped considerably into the direction of fusional and inflective, see Northern Sami language and especially Skolt Sami language –, they are definitely not polysynthetic, so that you couldn't form a word like "snow that falls on a red T-shirt" in any Sami language. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:34, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Irrelevant section

The last section, about compound words, is tangential. I don't think it helps this article. Cognita (talk) 05:46, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

nah, I can see the connection to the rest, it is relevant. But the link to the foregoing is not made very clear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.144.246 (talk) 14:31, 10 January 2012 (UTC)