Talk:Eskimo words for snow

Urban Legend debunkers disagree!

User:82.93.57.158 has added a link today that supposedly debunks the contention put forward in this article that Eskimo languages do not have proportionally more words for snow and ice. This happened after having had a long discussion over e-mail (that still hasn't finished) that started when I found this claim on the website maintained by User:82.93.57.158. The website is specifically dealing with debunking "urban legends", but deemed this myth to be true and used the link as evidence. This is the link: Internet newsgroup Alt.folkore.urban on Eskimo words for snow. Do you all think that this link is appropriate or are the contents of this wikipedia article misleading? Fedor 13:06, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The latter. The article, though probably correct in denying that the Eskimos have "hundreds of words for snow" then goes completelly off-beam in trying to prove English has as many words for snow as do Inuit languages. Most of the "English Words for Snow" are not "words for snow" at all.

The article is so awful I'm thinking of putting it forward for deletion. Exile 14:20, 7 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Exile, what the article is trying to convey is that the English words list are just as much 'words for snow' as the Eskimo words listed are - in other words, the words in either list range from good to pretty bad 'words for snow' depending on what you're looking for. You should perhaps note that the words as currently listed are those suggested as English snow lexemes by Prof. Maggie Browning, an Associate Professor in Princeton's Linguistics department, in her discussion of the issue - do we have a reason to discount her highly qualified opinion for yours?

I think the real issue here is that the page linked to (the one by Stu Derby) has arrived at an incorrect conclusion. For one thing, we should probably be looking at the original references this author has used to see if they support his conclusion - I'm pretty unimpressed with them actually; a general encyclopedia, a second hand dictionary (Eskimo -> German -> English!), a general text on 'historical linguistics', an account of a nineteenth century Church Missionary Society reverend - all of which leaves a single text that looks like it may be relevant.

I'd advise anyone interested in this topic to eschew 'urban legend pages' and usenet discussions and get a good book out of your local academic library - you should be able to find one (or at least a few journal articles) which focuses directly on this issue. It's not a simple matter. --Dom 09:40, 10 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't a TERRIBLE article, but it's all over the place. It's correct in its claim that the Eskimos don't really have hundreds of words for snow, but it doesn't really explain it very well. It totally ignores the issue of the morphemes, etc, of Eskimo words, and how they are put together, which is really crucial as to how the myth began. Much better than I could ever explain, from Language Log:

But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- 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.

THAT needs to be in the article. That's why it seems like they have hundreds of words for snow. Like the link says, "book", "books" "handbook", and "guidebook" do not count as entirely different concepts in our language. Other issue is that the wiki article needs to explain the Sapir-Whorf issue and why people seem to believe that Eskimos see the world differently as a result of the way they categorize snow.

--devotchka oct 10 2005

Fantastic. Edit away!

A niggle, unrelated to your vision for the article: if adding a postbase to a root word in Eskimo forms a 'distinct word', how is this any different to combining two nouns in English. I would hold that it's no different, and that, just as in Eskimo, the number of 'distinct' English words derivable from a single root (say, snow) is also unbounded. "handbook" and "guidebook" are just as 'different' as "apun" and "aput" are.

--Dom 00:37, 11 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I tried my best. Tell me how it is!

--devotchka oct 11 2005

Excellently written! I will try to update the Dutch article accordingly... Fedor 08:26, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Go team! Nice to see that awful list is gone! --Dom 10:33, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps there needs to be a discussion of the difference between a "term" and a "word." All the small-count numbers suggest they are talking about actual, single words; all the large-count number suggest they are including any and all terms, including compound words and multi-word phrases. Personally, I think both methods of counting are valid, but any study needs to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, since new terms can be created almost infinitely by added "snow" or "ice" to other words ("ice sculpture"). English includes words like ice, icicle, hail, snow, blizzard, etc. as well as many, many snow-related terms like iceberg, snowball, snow flurries, snowman, snow fort, black ice, snow bank, snow drift, artificial snow, shaved ice, ice cube, etc. --Tysto 19:25, 11 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Debunking those who debunk the debunkers??

I looked at the list of purported words, and they are closer to "snow" than many of the words claimed elsewhere: for example, it doesn't include "igluksaq" (="house-building material") which is often claimed. That said, it still seems misleading to claim that these are all "words" for snow, because what amounts to a "word" in Eskimoan languages, is very different from what amounts to a "word" in English. As others have pointed out, what we would express with a phrase, Inuit, Greenlandic, etc., tend to glom together into a "word". Think of it as them just leaving out a lot of spaces. German does the same thing, though to a lesser extent.

I'd like to commission a speaker of Greenlandic to make a similar list of "words for grass" or even "words for sand". I'll bet they could come up with just as many as for snow, by using a couple basic words for grass or sand and modifying them in the same ways. If a purported list were to be in the article, I'd want to see better documentation, and a column breaking the words into their parts so people could see they're compounds, not basic words.

The LanguageLog article cited above ( http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000405.html ) is quite good -- glad someone added it to the refs.

All that said, I'll momentarily trot out my doctorate in linguistics to say that although I'd like to check out the purported source for the 49 words, I'm really skeptical. Just as we know Whorf raised the "count" from Boas' 4 to 7 (apparently by magic), this list may have just appeared -- many such lists have, ranging from dozens to several hundreds of words. And depending on how you count, you could probably generate any number of "words" that happen to contain Eskimo morphemes for snow, just as you could generate any number of phrases the happen to contain English words for snow.

I did some Googling and found about 50 pages that seem to have much the same list as at http://tafkac.org/language/eskimo_words_for_snow_derby.html Most of the words only occur on 40-50 pages; mostly the same 40-50 pages. I find it really interesting that they vary slightly, suggesting that like some viruses, this word-list is very prone to mutation. A few words (for example sullarniq and qanipalaat) show up on more pages, but with other uses, like as names. Very few of these words *ever* show up except in versions of this list, which I think should make us suspicious.

There are also about 50 copies of a very amusing *spoof* list, e.g. a copy is at http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/varia/snow.html including:

  depptla         a small snowball, preserved in Lucite, that had been handled by Johnny Depp

Perhaps a citation to the spoof list would be useful? Presumably with an explanation for the rare reader unable to perceive that it's a spoof....

Sderose 00:49, 23 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I put it in with 'external links' because I think it's pretty funny, but I don't think that spoof lists have made enough clout to dramatically impact the myth the way other things have. Still, I mentioned that it's a spoof, just in case somebody gets a little confused.

devotchka 23 oct 2005

I know few things about the matter, but I've read an article about pole-exploration and there used a special word to say "one-year old snow", something like pukak I can't remember. 81.211.185.24 15:25, 21 December 2005 (UTC)xmav[reply]

81.211.185.24 15:39, 21 December 2005 (UTC)xmav A little search inside Internet found http://www.well.com/~gilesgal/Snowwords.html According to me, if you need several words to translate something a language feels like words, and these words form not a compound, then one can say that language has several "single" word in order to define better the same concept. A translation like "one-year-old-snow" for pukak (if the word is correct) does not tell us english has a new word for snow, even in the case that, say, pu = snow, kak = 1 (year)...[reply]

The Situation in Sweden...

A Swedish book by Yngve Ryd (born 1952), Snö - en renskötare berättar (Ordfront, 2001, ISBN:91-7324-785-5) lists more than 300 words for snow in the Sami language. The author comments that reindeer-herding Sami have a more intense relationship to snow than Eskimos. There are Sami words for the different kinds of snow on the surface, where you walk or ski, and other words for the snow conditions near the ground, where the reindeer find their food even in the winter. The same author has also published a book on the Sami's relationship to fire. -- A recent enquiry (fall 2005) made by the Swedish public radio found 90 different words in Swedish for children's habit of "washing" or rubbing each others faces with snow (source: the radio show "Språket", Sveriges Radio P1, January 10, 2006). Since this habit is not used by grown-ups, neither is the word. These words are passed by oral tradition from 8-year-olds to 4-year-olds and this makes them the linguistic equivalent to fruit flies. --LA2 12:50, 10 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I found a Norwegian page once, listing Norwegian words of snow, based on the Eskimo rumor. Itw was quite interesting, and could be added. 惑乱分からん 16:50, 27 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The Situation in Canada

The linguists at the Nunavut Arctic College (http://www.nac.nu.ca/main.htm) are maintaining a pretty extensive on-line dictionary of the standard language spoken in Nunavut, with a very explicit support of the Nunavut Government itself(http://www.gov.nu.ca/Nunavut/). The dictionary itself is at http://www.livingdictionary.com/main.jsp, linked from both of the first two sites, and gives the sources of its content at its site.

(Caution: using translating dictionaries is a tricky business. There is no such thing as perfect equivalents between two languages, counting search results is a completely meaningless exercise, and the more reliable direction for making any conclusions whatsoever is always the the-less-known-to-the-more-known language direction.)

It makes it easy for anyone well-accustomed to using a translating dictionary to gather the inclination of the Inuit lexicon. (It is a pity that this article actually ignores or negates all Inuit-language evidence, as well as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (while invoking Whorf and Boas by names!), in an effort to "debunk". Whereas it is closer to the truth than the urban legend it fights against, it makes up some pretty naive conclusions, ending up unverifiable and by no means NPOV.)

Lalaith

Inuits?

I think Inuits is the preferred term as opposed to eskimos Happyhyper 08:34, 2 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]