Eskimo words for snow

The "Eskimo words for snow" claim is a widespread misconception alleging that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. In fact, the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does.^[1]^[2] In contrast, the European Sami People, an indigenous circumpolar group, do have hundreds of words for snow.^[3]^[4]^[5]

Languages in the Inuit language group add suffixes to words to express the same concepts expressed in English and many other languages by means of compound words, phrases, and even entire sentences. One can create a practically unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages on any topic, not just snow, and these same concepts can be expressed in other languages using combinations of words. It is therefore not relevant or meaningful to compare the number of words between languages that create words in different ways due to different grammatical structures.^[1]^[6]^[7] Most linguists today consider it a myth that Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow.

Origins and significance

The first reference to Inuit having multiple words for snow is in the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. He says:

...just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning 'water' in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput 'snow on the ground', gana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift'

The essential morphological question is why a language would say, for example, "lake", "river", and "brook" instead of something like "waterplace", "waterfast", and "waterslow". English has more than one snow-related word, but Boas' intent may have been to connect differences in culture with differences in language.

Edward Sapir's and Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativity holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world. This idea is also reflected in the concept behind General Semantics. In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having three words for snow.^[8] Later writers inflated the figure in sensationalized stories: by 1978, the number quoted had reached fifty, and on February 9, 1984, an unsigned editorial in The New York Times gave the number as one hundred.^[9]

The idea that Inuit had so many words for snow has given rise to the idea that Inuit viewed snow very differently from people of other cultures. For example, when it snows, others see snow, but Eskimos could see any manifestation of their great and varied vocabulary. Vulgarized versions of Whorf's views hold not only that Inuit speakers can choose among several snow words, but that they do not categorize all seven (or however many) as "snow": to them, each word is supposedly a separate concept. Thus language is thought to impose a particular view of the world — not just for Eskimo languages, but for all groups.^{[citation needed]}

Focal vocabulary hypothesis

Part of the supposition is that Eskimo languages would have a focal vocabulary with several extra words to describe snow, which is specifically the point of Boas's theory. They deal with snow more than other cultures, just as artists have more words to describe the various details of their profession — what a non-artist calls "paint", the artist identifies as "oil paint", "acrylic paint", or "watercolor". This does not mean that these two individuals are observing two different objects, nor does it mean that the artist would be confused by the idea that oil paint and acrylic paint are related. Likewise in English, the words "blizzard", "flurry", "pack", "slush," "drift", "sleet," and "powder" refer to different types of snow, but all are recognized as varieties of "snow" in a general sense.

Defining "Eskimo"

There is no one Eskimo language. A number of cultures are referred to as Eskimo, and a number of different languages are termed Eskimo–Aleut languages. These languages may have more or fewer words for "snow", depending on which language is considered.

Word boundary issues

There are several issues regarding the definition of "word":

Inflection can create several permutations of the same root (lexeme). (Most writers count lexemes, not inflectional variants, in their comparisons.)
Polysynthetic languages can mechanistically combine what would be several words in a phrase in another language into a single "word".
English compounds and compounds in other languages can be written with a space, creating controversy over whether a "word" should be defined by an orthographic word divider or by lexeme status (whether a compound has an independent entry in a dictionary or lexicon).
The same morpheme can appear in multiple lexemes, creating controversy over whether the lexemes are sufficiently "different".

Eskimo word synthesis

By some definitions of "word", the number of Eskimo words for snow is approximately as large as the number of English sentences that can contain the word "snow", because Eskimo languages (like many native North American languages) are polysynthetic. Polysynthetic languages allow noun incorporation, resulting in a single compound word that is the equivalent of a phrase in other languages (Spencer 1991). The Eskimo languages have systems of derivational suffixes for word formation to which speakers can recursively add snow-referring roots. As in English, there are a handful of these snow-referring roots, such as for "snowflake", "blizzard", "drift". What an English speaker would describe as "frosty sparkling snow" a speaker of an Eskimo language such as Inuinnaqtun would call "patuqun", and express "is covered in frosty sparkling snow" as "patuqutaujuq",^{[citation needed]} much as an English speaker might use "sleet" and "sleet-covered". Arguably the concept is the same in both languages. This is true of things other than snow: "qinmiq" means "dog", "qinmiarjuk" "young dog", and "qinmiqtuqtuq" "goes by dog team".

Compounding and orthography

A word may be a compound and a compound may have a space in it. Thus, a word may have a space in it.

A dictionary definition of compound is 'a word made of words' like firefighter, study hour, and left-handed.^[10] Thus, high school (with a space) is one word.

English compound elements that are themselves English words may be written open (e.g. particle board), hyphenated (e.g. particle-board), or solid (e.g. particleboard).^[11]

A word pair over time often becomes a compound, definitely so in English when the primary stress is on the first element.^[12]

References

^ ^a ^b Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation in Language Log: The list of snow-referring roots to stick [suffixes] on isn't that long [in the Eskimoan language group]: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.
^ The seven most common English words for snow are snow, hail, sleet, ice, icicle, slush, and snowflake. English also has the related word glacier and the four common skiing terms pack, powder, crud, and crust, so one can say that at least 12 distinct words for snow exist in English.
^ [1] Diversity in Saami terminology for reindeer and snow, Dr. Ole Henrik Magga.
^ 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."
^ The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, Geoffrey Pullum, Chapter 19, p. 159-171 of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, Geoffrey K. Pullum, With a Foreword by James D. McCawley. 246 p., 1 figure, 2 tables, Spring 1991, LC: 90011286, ISBN 978-0-226-68534-2
^ People who live in an environment in which snow or different kinds of grass, for example, play an important role are more aware of the different characteristics and appearances of different kinds of snow or grass and describe them in more detail than people in other environments. It is however not meaningful to say that people who see snow or grass as often but use another language have less words to describe it if they add the same kind of descriptive information as separate words instead of as "glued-on" (agglutinated) additions to a similar number of words. In other words, English speakers living in Alaska, for example, have no trouble describing as many different kinds of snow as Inuit speakers.
^ Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. "Science and Linguistics" In Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge: MIT Press. p210.
^ "There's Snow Synonym". The New York Times. February 9, 1984. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
^ Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Merriam-Webster, 1966), entry, third compound, def. 1a.
^ Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Merriam-Webster, 1966), The Writing of Compounds, section 1.1 (at p. 30a).
^ The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, by Kenneth George Wilson (N.Y.: Columbia Univ. Press, [casebound?] [1st printing?] 1993), entry COMPOUNDS, COMPOUNDING (1 entry).

External links

Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation from Language Log
"Eskimo" words for snow by Steven DeRose, including English lists
Snow' lexemes in Yup'ik (reposted)
Listing various polysynthetic Eskimo words

[Pullum's_explanation-1] Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation in Language Log: The list of snow-referring roots to stick [suffixes] on isn't that long [in the Eskimoan language group]: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

[2] The seven most common English words for snow are snow, hail, sleet, ice, icicle, slush, and snowflake. English also has the related word glacier and the four common skiing terms pack, powder, crud, and crust, so one can say that at least 12 distinct words for snow exist in English.

[3] [1] Diversity in Saami terminology for reindeer and snow, Dr. Ole Henrik Magga.

[4] ttp://scandinavian.wisc.edu The Sami Language Department of Scandinavian Studies - The University of Wisconsin-Madison retrieved 4/18/2011

[5] 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."

[6] The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, Geoffrey Pullum, Chapter 19, p. 159-171 of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, Geoffrey K. Pullum, With a Foreword by James D. McCawley. 246 p., 1 figure, 2 tables, Spring 1991, LC: 90011286, ISBN 978-0-226-68534-2

[7] People who live in an environment in which snow or different kinds of grass, for example, play an important role are more aware of the different characteristics and appearances of different kinds of snow or grass and describe them in more detail than people in other environments. It is however not meaningful to say that people who see snow or grass as often but use another language have less words to describe it if they add the same kind of descriptive information as separate words instead of as "glued-on" (agglutinated) additions to a similar number of words. In other words, English speakers living in Alaska, for example, have no trouble describing as many different kinds of snow as Inuit speakers.

[8] Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. "Science and Linguistics" In Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge: MIT Press. p210.

[9] "There's Snow Synonym". The New York Times. February 9, 1984. Retrieved 2008-06-07.

[10] Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Merriam-Webster, 1966), entry, third compound, def. 1a.

[11] Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Merriam-Webster, 1966), The Writing of Compounds, section 1.1 (at p. 30a).

[12] The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, by Kenneth George Wilson (N.Y.: Columbia Univ. Press, [casebound?] [1st printing?] 1993), entry COMPOUNDS, COMPOUNDING (1 entry).

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