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Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'
- jnord 1y agohttps://archive.md/YYH8X https://archive.md/YYH8X
- FrankWilhoit 1y ago[flagged]
- pjc50 1y agoIf you're going to say things like that you should spell out what you mean.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FrankWilhoit 1y ago[flagged]
- Etheryte 1y agoBorders and migration aren't about a single trait like language, there are many countries worldwide where either the only or primary language is the same, but they're distinctly different countries when it comes to most anything else. Culture and identity are much wider concepts than simply the ability to speak.
- int_19h 1y agoThere are also many countries where the primary language is the same only because of concerted efforts by the central government to force it upon everyone and to wipe out regional languages and dialects, usually in the past couple centuries or so. France, Spain, Italy are all examples.
- janalsncm 1y agoMandarin is another example. Not easy to find a Cantonese dictionary despite having more speakers than Italian.
- more_corn 1y agoThere are about a dozen types of snow. It’s quite reasonable for people who care about the difference to be able to describe them in language. Anyone who has shoveled snow can tell you there’s a difference between a cold light snow and a heavy wet snow. Anyone who has walked on snow crust can recall the feeling. Ask anyone who skis what his favorite type of snow is. His least favorite: Champaign powder, fat wet flakes, cold fluff, icy crust, I could probably talk for an hour about the different types of snow and the conditions that lead to them. Some types of snow lead to avalanche conditions. Some are dangerous to drive in. Some are a dream to ski, some make you turn around and go home. Maybe we don’t have singular words for it, but we certainly can describe the differences in language. It would be insane to think otherwise.
- int_19h 1y agoI don't think anyone ever posited that it's impossible to describe the differences. Only that some languages optimize for things that they encounter regularly. With respect to snow and snow-related things, I actually ran into this personally. That thick icy crust on snow that you've described in your comment - it has a dedicated word for it in Russian, наст (nast). It never occurred to me that there isn't an equivalent single word for that in English in 20 years of living in English-speaking countries because it simply doesn't occur in the areas where I live. Until, one day, it did, and I realized that I have to explain-translate it. (Some other languages that have a dedicated word for that are Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian)
- metalman 1y agowhen discussing the Inuit, or way up far north people, it is important to recognise there many indipendently invented technologys, and the language to go with them. I was very surprised one day to encounter snow that would in fact be suitable to cut into blocks and used structuraly.It is not like any other snow and is composed of a wind blown deposit, but I suspect that the exaxt conditions for the creation and bonding of the particles are rare @ the 45th paralell where I live. As to language comanalities and roots, ya sure whatever, it is clear that language is inate, and there are endless spontainious dialects and outright new languages poping up, and at ond point someone had a list of actual languages that had less speakers than klingon. And generational and class cultural boundry's demand some way to keep secrets and invent ways to create a comunication system that allows for planning a friday night after work shindig, blow the roof off, but you still want to sit and chat with grandma.....so
- pjc50 1y agoThis is somewhat similar to the language vector embedding, isn't it? And the article asks the reasonable question "what is the difference between having a single word for a thing versus a commonly understood cluster of words?". It's not a hard boundary. Every translation loses a little bit of information but potentially brings in different connotations. The things that translators and localizers argue about endlessly: do we look for the words that most closely match the other words, or do we look for feeling and meaning that most closely matches the original intent?
- hannasanarion 1y agoFlake, avalanche, snow, zastrugi, powder, firn, dump, pillow, iceberg, chop, snowball, flurry, yukimarimo, piste, ice, snirt, corn, blizzard, cornice, drift, freshie, smud, penitentes, frost, hardpack, slurry, berm, chowder, hoar, icicle, neve, slush, styrofoam, glacier, sleet, graupel, crust, crud, dendrites I heard the Eskimos have over 50 words for a bad example ^ my favorite t-shirt. So many of these studies also abuse compound words and misunderstand agglutination to produce their shocking counts.
- sudobash1 1y agoA claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love. If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more. Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.
- Der_Einzige 1y ago[flagged]
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoThis seems like a really funny concept to me, that any language should be pure. How many millennia do we need to go back for purity? What is untainted English? Only words from the Angles?
- ToValueFunfetti 1y agoYou may find Anglish amusing, then: https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
- ks2048 1y agoThe data exploration tool linked-to from the article: https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html
- tralarpa 1y agoWhy does the tool say that "cable" is the lexically most elaborated word in French?
- JohnCClarke 1y agoSo, the Innuit may not have 100 words for "snow" after all. But the Hacker's Dictionary really does contain 216 synonyms for "broken". [*] https://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html https://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html
- Tor3 1y agoBoas claimed in 1884 that the Inuit language on Baffin Island had four words for snow. The "100" was inflated through re-telling. And that number has been thoroughly refuted. Of course. Inuit languages don't have 100 different roots for snow. As for "four".. well, English has several too (snow, sleet, slush, firn..), and most other languages from regions where snow exists have a number of such words. Nothing new there.
- ipaddr 1y agoThey have a few. Aput: Snow on the ground. Qana: Falling snow. Piqsirpoq: Drifting snow. Kaniq: Frost. Kanevvluk: Fine snow. Muruaneq: Soft deep snow. Nutaryuk: Fresh snow. Pirta: Blizzard. Qengaruk: Snow bank.
- antihipocrat 1y agoNot arguing against the idea that the Inuit have many more words for snow. But in english their are many commonly understood equivalents. Even more if you're into the snow sport scene that may reach Inuit levels. Common words off the top of my head: Snow on the ground: Snowpack, hardpack, powder, crust, crud, piste Falling snow: snowing, sleet, blizzard, snowstorm. Drifting snow: snowdrift. Frost: frost. Modern scene lingo Pow, corduroy, granular, chunder, cornice etc
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoGraupel
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- johnnyjeans 1y agoin a polysynthetic language like inuit, "words" aren't really a useful category to measure. i'd hedge my bets the amount of words for snow approaches infinity. do they perhaps mean "roots"?
- canjobear 1y agoThe technical claim about Inuit is indeed about roots, not words.
- earthicus 1y ago"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept." This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.
- mzs 1y agoIndeed, I looked at some highly scored words for Polish in google translate and they are words where the foreign word, transliterations into Polish, and Polish word are used. And when you pare it down to say five real distinctive meanings, you often find similar less commonly used synonyms in English. Also as I was looking through it seemed that possibly it was not taking into consideration verb vs. noun in English cause the counts seemed oddly way off for some where it could have happened. If you are familiar with English and another language, I would like to know what you see.
- yorwba 1y agoYeah, lots of fun data issues can be found in their exploration tool https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html Icelandic has a bunch of dictionary abbrevations: medic(al), temp(us), germ(anic), veg(etation). Tarifit is dominated by linguistic terminology. German has a few German words that look like English words meaning something completely different (mantel, tier, boot, stall), one loanword (angst) and what might be dictionary abbrevations again: humor(ous), miner(alogy), spa(nish)...
- eastburnn 1y agoSeeing the maps was interesting. Pretty sure there are like 2 dozen words for weed…
- Funes- 1y ago[flagged]
- jauco 1y agoI can’t find the actual words. I’d like to see the four french synonyms for abandonment that they counted.
- xhkkffbf 1y agoSo someone named Geoff Pullum called this a hoax. Now that claim may be wrong. Did the journalist find some explanation of why Pullum said that? I'm curious.
- alwa 1y agoHere is his essay, if you’re wondering! It’s short and zippy and pretty fun—has the flavor of that slightly smug, sarcastic, sassy contrarianism of the New Atheists’ writing in that time— https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pdf https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pd... > What i do here is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986. Laura Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Cleveland State University. She endures calmly the fact that virtually no one listened to her when she first published. It may be that few will listen to me as I explain in different words to another audience what she pointed out. But the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said they do. Anyone who insists on simply checking their primary sources will find that they are quite unable to document the alleged facts about snow vocabulary (but nobody ever checks, because the truth might not be what the reading public wants to hear).
- ks2048 1y agoAlso worth noting that Pullum is a well-known linguist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_K._Pullum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_K._Pullum (and there is a Wikipedia page for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)
- kragen 1y agoLinked from the article: https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pdf https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pd...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoOne way to improve the rigor of this research would be to embed each word in each language in a common latent space then look for clusters. But creating that latent space and the corresponding embedding algorithm is hard in the first place. Today’s embedding models could be terrible for the fringe languages this research is about, and we wouldn’t know because we don’t know how to evaluate overall semantic accuracy. Am I off piste here?
- ted_dunning 1y agoNot really off piste. But there is another big issue in that different languages (and especially North American indigenous languages) tend to have radically different notions of "word". As such, deciding what to embed is not easy.
- maxdamantus 1y agoArticle title: > Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’ Abstract from the cited paper [0]: > our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce non-obvious and well-grounded insights about language and culture. I think I'll continue to be sceptical of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. [0] https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2 https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2
- maxdamantus 1y agoSince this parent post is getting downvoted, maybe I should have elaborated: the claims in the title of this article ("proof of X") seem to be a lot stronger than the actual research paper it references ("suggests that X"). This subject is something that has been discussed for over a century (to be honest I'm not sure how much it's been considered seriously by linguists in recent years, but hey, I remember it being brought up back in LING201). The title of the article just seems a bit extreme to me, as if the debate around linguistic relativity is over now that someone ran a counter over some bilingual dictionaries. It's an interesting approach, and maybe it can give some direction into where to look, but I think we'd need a lot more than numerical analysis on dictionaries to prove something about language, and we need to account for other causes of correlations. Eg, bilingual dictionaries (which this research analyses) are likely to be compiled by people who are aware of these claims about their language. If you're creating a dictionary for a language that is known for having "X words for snow", you'll put more effort into listing many words for snow than many words for taste. Note that bilingual dictionaries often exist for language learning purposes, so they intentionally won't paint a complete picture of the language.
- scythe 1y agoSkiers also have many words for snow: powder, slush, corn, corduroy, crust, ice (not ice), blue ice (actually ice), windpack, popcorn (unrelated to "corn"), and of course the California favorite: cement.
- stephencanon 1y agodust on crust, firn, mashed potatoes (with or without gravy), graupel, chowder, crud, packed powder, blower pow, chop, fluff, smoke, ...
- ted_dunning 1y agoMy favorites (words, not stuff to ski on): sastrugi, haily puckles
- Dansvidania 1y agoI happened to write my bachelors thesis on the effect of mother-tongues on cognitive processes in 2012 and found the literature very vague on this issue. At the time the literature suggested that the cognitive processes are the same across populations of different mother-tongues but that language can influence the data those processes work upon, EG: exposed to the same events, what details get picked up, built into narratives and remembered. I would move that language constitutes a very strong mnemonic anchor if nothing else.
- anigbrowl 1y agoI would be interested in reading that.
- Tomte 1y agoI was participant in an fMRI study (done as PhD work by a computational linguist) that contrasted native speakers of German and Polish, showing that phonemes that exist in your native tongue are processed in different areas of your brain than phonemes that are non-native to you.
- vanderZwan 1y agoDo you know of any research into bilingual people and the effect of switching languages? I feel like I become an almost different person if I switch back to speaking Dutch for more than a day.
- throwaway81523 1y agoI'm not fluent in anything but English, but I've had some basic exposure to a few other languages. I've found when travelling that trying to struggle by in another country's language (avoiding English) is almost like reformatting my brain. It takes a few days to to reach the point where my surface thoughts are in the new language, but at the same time, my knowledge of the new language is so primitive that those thoughts can't have any complexity. I've wondered if that's anything like the mind-emptiness that Zen meditators are known to seek. Of course I could switch back to English when I had to. I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.
- bloppe 1y agoThe hoax is the interpretation that the language you speak has a significant impact on how you can think. This article seems to argue it's the inverse relationship, which is not nearly as controversial. English-speaking skiers have more words for "snow" than Inuktitut-speakers. It's the culture that shapes the language, not the language that shapes the mind.
- madaxe_again 1y agoI’d argue both shape each other. Portuguese is an example of this - there was a deliberate narrowing of the lexicon in the 20th century, even extending to losing certain tenses like the future perfect, and this has resulted in a narrowing of the field of expression. For example, in English you can say “by next week, I will have finished the work”, but in Portuguese you boil it down to the simple perfect, and it becomes unclear as to whether you have already done the work or not. You also just literally can’t translate stuff like “she must have been going to go” or “she would have had to have gone” or “I will have been living here for five years in two weeks”. This results in a loss of temporal thinking, hypothetical chains, and allocations of causality and responsibility, and while I don’t at all wish to besmirch the good Portuguese people, the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan. Or maybe it’s just a hangover from Salazar and I’m barking up the wrong tree, but often when I’ve attempted clarification on this stuff the distinction has just not been comprehensible to my interlocutor. I try to use stuff like the future perfect (as it still theoretically exists, but is almost entirely disused) and people just do not understand - either the structure or the concept.
- suddenlybananas 1y agoChinese doesn't have tense at all. That's why China has been utterly unable to plan anything over the past 30 years whereas the United States with their nicely tensed language has deftly planned and organised lots of infrastructure for the future.
- biorach 1y ago
- KingOfCoders 1y ago"for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term." From my perspective this is the hoax. I come from the alps and we have dozens of terms for snow. Only those people without snow might have one word, because they have no need to describe different versions of snow. I remember Sulz, Firn, Neu, Kunst, Matsch, Harsch, Papp, Pulver, ... (left 35 years ago).
- freilanzer 1y agoThis is still Pappschnee, Neuschnee, Pulverschnee, etc.
- bjourne 1y agoBlötsnö, nysnö, pulversnö. I can make up new ones too: lastbilssnö (truck snow). With agglutenative languages counting words doesn't work.
- decimalenough 1y agoThis is in fact thought to be a large reason for the original "Eskimo words for snow" claim: Inuit languages are extremely agglutinative.
- ranadomo 1y agoI believe this is the case and the wiki summary seems to agree. > 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, apu- 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow#cite_note-Pullum's_explanation-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow#cite_not... The Lexical Elaboration Explorer app does not allow one to see the actual words for snow for any language, so the tool is mostly a geographic and word-density plotter, but neither the article nor the website add much nuance to this debate. The hypothesis is fairly obvious: languages have words for common things. It's not really falsifiable and I find this type of analysis typical of modern research. Sloppy, surface-level, coding-tutorial demonstrations of mostly useless data display.
- nickdothutton 1y agoThe British have umpteen ways to describe rain storms/showers. Drizzle, deluge, mizzle, pouring, bucketing, lashing, and quite a few words for wind. Speaking of which the wind, which is the major feature of the weather in Arab countries... has given rise to umpteen different words for explaining what kind of wind they are experiencing, some of which don't really have an English translation. The "proof" was always right there in front of them.
- nopinsight 1y agoWords are more than just symbols; they represent concepts and patterns we observe in the world, in our society, and inside ourselves. Translation is only possible because we are all humans and have experienced broadly similar concepts, but there's a limit to it, especially in social milieu and in how we conceptualize ourselves in society. To truly understand another people and culture at a deep level, you need to learn their native tongue and their living environment -- This is what I've internalized as a long-time learner and teacher of languages.
- dmos62 1y agoI love how languages reveal cultural and societal features. A popular example is that in English the word "free" means both "gratis" and "libre", which, in my opinion, are very distinct meanings in today's world. I like to imagine the kind of worldviews that generated a given language feature. I'll share some other revealing or at least interesting examples I liked; I'll paste below some cherry-picked excerpts from a conversation I had with an LLM: Japanese: Honne vs. Tatemae Words: 本音 (honne, true feelings) vs. 建前 (tatemae, public facade) Cultural significance: Japanese society values harmony and social cohesion. The existence of specific terms for “what you really think” vs. “what you say to maintain face” reflects the high cultural importance of context-sensitive communication and emotional restraint. Korean: Nuanced honorifics System: Verbal endings, titles, and pronouns change based on age, status, and relationship Cultural significance: The extreme granularity of politeness levels in Korean reflects a hierarchical, Confucian-influenced society where social status, age, and respect are central to daily interactions. Russian: Degrees of truth and lies Words: ложь (lozh, a lie), неправда (nepravda, untruth), and правда (pravda, truth) Cultural significance: Russian distinguishes between lies and non-truths—which can imply omission, alternative interpretations, or state-controlled narratives. The prominence of pravda (also the name of a Soviet newspaper) shows how central truth and its manipulation are in Russian cultural-political life. Spanish: Ser vs. Estar (to be) Words: Ser (essential being) vs. Estar (temporary state) Cultural significance: The fact that Spanish makes a grammatical distinction between inherent traits (ser feliz – being a happy person) and current states (estar feliz – feeling happy now) may reflect a worldview that embraces fluidity in personal and social identity. Danish: Hygge Word: Hygge — cozy, intimate, contented atmosphere Cultural significance: This untranslatable term reflects a cultural emphasis on modest comfort, emotional safety, and communal well-being—especially during long, cold winters. It's not just a word but a cultural ideal. Finnish’s lack of a future tense Finnish uses present-tense forms to talk about future events, relying on context or adverbs instead of a separate future-tense verb. Some linguists argue this encourages a more present-focused worldview, though opinions vary. Tsimané (Amazonian): No Fixed Future vs. Past Distinction Grammar: Many Amazonian languages (like Tsimané) have clear past vs. “non-past” rather than past vs. future. Cultural significance: Reflects a worldview where the future is not an ontological category—reinforcing an orientation toward present action and community relationships rather than distant plans. French savoir vs. connaître French distinguishes “knowing how” (savoir) from “knowing someone or being familiar with something” (connaître). English’s single “know” hides this nuance, whereas French speakers constantly signal whether they’re referring to factual/learned knowledge or personal acquaintance/experience. Georgian: Evidentiality Markers Grammar: Verb prefixes or particles indicate how the speaker knows what they’re saying (e.g., witnessed vs. heard vs. inferred). Cultural significance: The need to signal source of knowledge underlines a communal emphasis on accuracy, trustworthiness, and relational nuance. Quechua: Three-way Evidentiality Markers: Distinguish whether information is firsthand (-mi), hearsay (-si), or inferred (-chá). Cultural significance: Highlights a worldview where knowing how one learned something is as important as the information itself—rooted in oral tradition and communal storytelling.
- skywhopper 1y agoThis is an over-broad headline on a credulous article about a simplistic study of heavily biased data sources. It certainly isn’t “proof” or “sweeping”. Truly terrible article.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoHmm... Americans have many different words for "penis." I'll just get my coat...
- TurkishPoptart 1y ago"...claiming the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term." That's just wrong. Ask anyone who does alpinism, snowboarding, or skiing. You'll hear at least 10+ different words for this substance.
- beeforpork 1y agoItalian has thousands of words for pasta. Why was this not examined?