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Shockingly bad journalism here. The 'hoax' that Pullum wrote about was the specific claim that Inuktitut has a lot of words for snow. This is false, and the ref
by foldr 1y ago
Shockingly bad journalism here. The 'hoax' that Pullum wrote about was the specific claim that Inuktitut has a lot of words for snow. This is false, and the referenced paper agrees (pointing out that "discussion of lexical elaboration has been tarnished by unscholarly claims about Inuit words
for snow"). The detailed results of the paper are perhaps of some interest, but at base it is making the very unremarkable claim that languages differ in how many vocabulary items they map to different areas of conceptual space. It could hardly be otherwise.
- apothegm 1y agoDidn’t read the paper, but Inuktitut produces words in a compound manner, right? Not quite like Germanic languages where you can crash a bunch of adjectives and nouns together to make a new word. But if I understand correctly, the syntax is such that complex concepts that in English might be a dozen-word “noun phrase” or “adjectival phrase” or extended description of an action (not sure “verb phrase” is a real term) are expressed as single, possibly extremely long, words in Inuktitut.
- foldr 1y agoYes, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the number of lexical roots that roughly correspond to English ‘snow’. We wouldn’t say that English has five words for snow because of ‘snow’, ‘snows’ (plural noun), ‘snows’ (verb), ‘snowed’, ‘snowing’.
- apothegm 1y agoAh, it’s discussing roots rather than words?