Sigh . . . today’s post was going to be about how language forms thought. From a business intelligence perspective, the data items within an organization’s automated systems determine the questions that can be answered via analytical systems. It would have been brilliant. You would have loved it.

The post was going to lay out all the words the Eskimo people have for snow. Then I would explain the need for all of those words because of the nature of their lifestyles. I would tie that into the semantic difficulties that frequently face data warehouse projects. The post could have even changed your life.

I did a Google search on “Eskimo words for snow”. The story would have been better when I listed all the great Eskimo words for snow. I found a Wikipedia post that says that this great story, one that I have told so many times, is an urban legend. Say it is not so!!

Of course when faced with facts that I do not like, I assume that the source is wrong. I searched deeper into the Google results. I only find that this urban legend is discussed frequently by linguists.

There goes one of my favorite stories. Is knowledge that I do not like valuable? Is accurate knowledge more valuable than a great metaphor?

Origins and significance of the myth

The first reference to Eskimo having multiple words for snow is in the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. He mentions that Eskimos have four words: aput (“snow on the ground”), qana (“falling snow”), piqsirpoq (“drifting snow”), and qimuqsuq (“snowdrift”), where English has only one (“snow”). English has more than one snow-related word, but Boas’ intent was to connect differences in culture with differences in language.

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf’s hypothesis of linguistic relativism holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world. In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having seven distinct words for snow. Later writers inflated the figure: by 1978, the number quoted had reached 50, and on February 9, 1984 an editorial in The New York Times gave the number as 100.

The idea that Eskimos had hundreds of words for snow has given rise to the idea that Eskimos 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 Eskimo 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. Whorf, a well-informed and respectful student of Native American cultures, held more sophisticated views than this caricature would suggest.

The truth of the situation

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.

Eskimo languages have more than one word to describe snow. For example, Yupik has been estimated to have around 24 — but English has at least 40 words that describe frozen water, including “berg”, “frost”, “glacier”, “hail”, “ice”, “slush”, “flurry”, and “sleet”.

It is reasonable to suppose that Eskimo languages would have several extra words to describe snow, which is specifically the point of Boas’s theory. This is because 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 see two different things, nor does it mean that the artist would be confused by the idea that oil paint and acrylic paint are related.

In fact, the number of Eskimo words for snow is unbounded, because Eskimo languages (like many native North American languages) are polysynthetic. Polysynthetic languages allow noun-incorporation, resulting in a single word that is the equivalent of a phrase in other languages (Spencer 1991), having a system of derivational suffixes for word formation to which speakers can recursively add snow-referring roots. As in English, there is 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”. 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”.

Conclusion

There are two principal fallacies in this myth. The first is that Eskimo languages have more words for snow than English does, when they may have a few more or a few less, depending on which Eskimo language. As in English, these words are related to each other: for example, blizzards and flurries are two different types of snow, but they are both recognized as ’snow’ in the general sense. Speakers of Eskimo languages categorize different types of snow in a similar manner to English speakers.

The second fallacy comes from a misconception of what are to be considered “words”. As in other polysynthetic languages, the use of derivational suffixes and noun-incorporation results in terms or language codes that may include various descriptive nuances, whether describing snow or any other concept. Because Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, they describe concepts in compound terms or ‘words’ of unlimited length.

Source: Wikipedia

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