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Snow blind tale puts words in 'Eskimo' mouths

Apparently Eskimos know all about snow, and we think we know all about what Eskimos call it. But Dr Karl reckons there are hundreds of reasons to not believe the hype.

Last time, I began talking about the myth that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for the word snow in their native languages.

Geoffrey K. Pullum gives a great history of this myth in his book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language.

He discussed the myth of the "multitude of snow descriptors used by these lexically profligate hyperborean nomads, about whom so little information is repeated so often to so many".

He showed how little truth there was in this myth. He relied a lot on the detective work of Professor Laura Martin.

Pullum writes that the myth that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow began in a low-key fashion with Franz Boas in 1911, about a century ago.

Franz Boas wrote an introduction to the book, The Handbook of North American Indians. In this introduction, Boas discussed how there are different types of terms used to describe different things.

For example, take the thing we call water. With water, you can have either derived terms or independent terms.

Derived terms would include rain water, sea water, fresh water, brackish water and so on.

Independent terms would include lake, ocean, wave, dew, foam, and so on.

In his introduction, Boaz first discussed derived and independent terms. He then gave, as an example, some independent Eskimo terms for snow.

He gave exactly four — and only four — examples: aput meaning 'snow on the ground'; qana for 'falling snow'; piqsirpoq for 'drifting snow'; and qimuqsuq for 'snow drift'.

That was it, four independent Eskimo words for snow.

But then, the very talented and interesting Benjamin Lee Whorf enters the story.

Whorf had a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His regular day job was for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Connecticut as a fire prevention officer.

But Whorf was also a very talented amateur linguist. By himself, he deciphered classical Mayan hieroglyphs, and so he opened up an entire previously lost language.

He also invented very useful (and very specific) linguistic terms, such as 'cryptotype', that are used even today. Whorf is deeply respected for his lasting work.

But part of being human is making mistakes. Whorf's 1940 article, 'Science and Linguistics', showed he was very human. He wrote this, not for a peer-reviewed linguistic journal, but for MIT's promotional magazine, Technology Review. He claimed:

We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy ice, wind-driven flying snow…An Eskimo…would say that falling snow, slushy snow…are sensuously and operationally different. He uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.

That single paragraph has two major mistakes.

First, Whorf was wrong about our English language. We do have many independent words for snow. We call it: snow when it is white and fluffy; sleet for the partly melted falling stuff; slush when it is partly melted and on the ground; and so on.

Second, with absolutely no evidence or specific Eskimo knowledge, Whorf had increased the number of purported Eskimo words for snow.

Eighteen years later, in 1958, Roger Brown quoted this 'fact' about the number of Eskimo words for snow in his book Words and Things.

You guessed it! He got the number of Eskimo words for snow wrong, again.

Pullum writes: "After works like Brown's have picked up Whorf's second-hand mis-recollection of Boas to generate third-hand accounts, we begin to get fourth-hand accounts carelessly based on Brown."

After Brown, nobody went back to the original source of Boas. The misquoters multiply like rabbits.

In her book Aspects of Language and Culture, written in 1975, Carol Eastman quotes the 'fact' about Eskimos having lots of independent words for snow.

By 1978, Lanford Wilson's play, The Fifth of July, claims that there are 50 Eskimo words for snow.

So, with no proof at all, back in the late 1970s, the average citizen was being told that Eskimos had 50 independent words for snow.

But then it got even worse, and I'll talk more about that, next time.

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