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As a counterpoint from a linguist, everyone who's intrigued by this or the (nearly a century old!) "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" trope should read Geoff Pul
by lgessler 5y ago
As a counterpoint from a linguist, everyone who's intrigued by this or the (nearly a century old!) "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" trope should read Geoff Pullum's "The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax"[0]:
"The tale [...] is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other people's languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself."
"Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact."
"Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng's Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos... snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes..." (p. 137). Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers... fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes..." Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation."
"The final words of Laura Martin's paper are about her hope that we can come to see the Eskimo snow story as a cautionary tale reminding us of "the intellectual protection to be found in the careful use of sources, the clear presentation of evidence, and above all, the constant evaluation of our assumptions.""
[0] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf
Edit: like topaz0 points out, the point of the scholarly work this article describes is to preserve indigenous knowledge and language, which is great, though I think it's still important to raise Pullum's points as a tonic for the exoticism that inevitably arises here, arguably even within the news article.
- topaz0 5y agoAgreed. The Pullum article is one of my favorites.
- bluGill 5y agoI can easily come up with more than 100 English words for snow. I'm sure someone who speaks English in a more temperate area wouldn't know has many. The difference between slush and sleet is important to me. Then there are slangs like powder that are just a way of saying great for downhill skiing (I don't ski: to me powder is a meaningless slang that I hear others use - those who ski may have more words than me to describe how good the snow is for skiing)
- jobigoud 5y agoI'm not an English native speaker but I don't think powder is slang, it describes a specific kind of non compact snow, freshly fallen. The fact that skiers like it is coincidental. I don't think there is any other word for it that would be higher register.
- a-priori 5y agoI know the term is in that Pullum essay, but please stop using the term "Eskimo". I know Americans still use it, but it's a racist epithet that really needs to go away. The people are the Inuit, an individual Inuit person is an Inuk. Those are the terms that should be used.
- jcims 5y agoNot contending your point that there are folks that don't like the word, but Inuit isn't always a good substitute. Turns out it's quite nuanced and complex so a bit of grace seems warranted towards those that aren't intimately familiar with the situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#Usage
- fwip 5y agoGotcha, so then, then the appropriate word would be whichever specific group you're talking about (Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, etc), or a less racist umbrella category that describes who you mean, like "indigenous people in the pacific northwest."
- nextaccountic 5y agoWikipedia sees to imply that Inuinnaq is a more appropriate word, but I can't find mention of it elsewhere on the Web. Google returns only about 2000 results and they are not helpful.
- jcims 5y agoOr do what I would do in this case is generally withdraw from the conversation. I really don't want to needlessly offend folks by using terms out of favor, but upon reading the Wikipedia article it's clear I don't have remotely sufficient understanding of the cultures to successfully address the same population with some substitute that I naively pull out of my ass.
- a-priori 5y agoFor my own perspective, I am Canadian and that article is absolutely correct that the term is considered "racially charged" here. It's also correct that "Inuit" doesn't encompass all Indigenous peoples of the Arctic... but it doesn't have to? I don't see why you need such a term. If you want to talk about the Yupik people, use that term. If you want an all-encompassing term, use "Indigenous peoples". Even if, for whatever reason, you need a term that includes these ethnic groups, but excludes other indigenous peoples, then why does it have to be "Eskimo"? As a white person, I'm an outsider to the situation so I'm going to take my guidance from Inuit groups themselves, and they object to the term. There's nothing complex about saying that it's a bad idea to call a people by a term that they themselves consider offensive.
- jacobolus 5y agoLinguistics is hard. Bob Laughlin, creator of the amazing Tzotzil dictionary, did some fun experiments about the use of native-speaker informants, by testing American undergraduates’ knowledge of breakfast cereals. There were some respondents who mixed up the cereals. Some who put them in a few categories (something like "cheerios", "flakes", and "cereal"). Some who left most of the questions blank. One respondent identified all of the cereals as “shit”, “shit”, “shit”, ... The best informant correctly identified 5/8 cereals. One of the presented cereals was actually toucan food, which was identified by various informants as “raisin bran”, “grape nuts”, “grapenuts flakes”, “fertilizer scented breakfast food”. https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/1360 https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/1360 (see the introduction, pp. 9–12)