Talk:Eskimo words for snow

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[edit] 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)

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)

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)
The Maggie Browning text (http://www.princeton.edu/~browning/snow.html) isn't mentioned in the article or external links. Perhaps it should be? Regardless of what a linguistics professor says, this sentence rubs me the wrong way: 'This may seem impressive until one realizes that English has at least 40 [words for snow], including "berg", "frost", "glacier", "hail", "ice", "slush", "flurry", and "sleet"'. One problem is mentioned elsewhere on this talk page: what is a word? Her list of 22 lexemes contains 13 items I would consider words, eight phrases, and two that I've never heard or seen before, "pingo" from Inuit and "slushsnow" - are those two really English? Of the 13 words, I found six, maybe seven, that I would really consider "words for snow". For example, I think it's pretty clear that hail isn't snow, and "hail" isn't a word for snow. So in my opinion both aspects of the "words for snow" list - the "words" part and the "for snow" part - are suspect at best. Secondly, it claims at least 40 English words for snow and then lists eight. The list suggested as the source (which incidentally doesn't contain "berg" or for that matter "snow") has 22, some of which may or may not be words. What are the missing terms? I think that sentence needs to be revised at least, if not removed. Nasch 16:33, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
The article's phrase 'English has at least 40, including "berg"' is especially ill-advised, insofar as 'berg' is a German word. And it doesn't mean 'snow', it means 'mountain'. Ice-mountain, not ice-snow. Asat 08:05, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
"Berg" is a common short version of "iceberg". The relation to "snow" is somewhat contrived, but it's not immediately inappropriate. --Puellanivis 08:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

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)

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)

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

  • 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)

[edit] 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)

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

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)...

[edit] 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)

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)

[edit] 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

[edit] Inuits?

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

Of course. But the Eskimo/Inuit distinction can also be useful as an indicator, whether a Wikipedia article is giving actual information concerning actual ethnic groups (there are quite a few such wiki articles, using "Inuit") or not (this article is probably pretty far from the linguistic reality, for example, and indicates the fact properly by using the childbook term "Eskimo".) To give a specific example, quoting this article: "perhaps a few less depending on which Eskimo language one is focusing on"; here, I guess, the author didn't have the vaguest idea of a specific example of such "Eskimo language". If an unverifiable statement like this is mechanically changed to "perhaps a few less depending on which Inuit language one is focusing on", it will just become more dangerous (assuming it is just what the author's phantasy produced while trying to convey a valid point that there are differences between Inuit languages as spoken in specific parts of Greenland, Nunavut, or Alaska, and not a citable fact itself.) Lalaith
Actually, Lalaith, you're completely wrong. Eskimo is the superset - there are five major Eskimo languages, only one of which is Inuit - Inuit can be further broken down into well differentiated dialects, but these aren't the languages in question. It's prefectly correct to refer to a "Eskimo language" (you're right in that changing Eskimo to Inuit makes no sense - it's like saying "less depending on which English language...") Furthermore, while Inuit is the prefered term in Canada, it's not in other places - such as many native communities in Alaska. So, to clarify, this article uses the term Eskimo because, in the words of one of the sources listed, "it properly refers to any Eskimo group, not only the Inuit". --Dom 14:20, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Inuit doesn't take an 's' since it is already in the plural. Singular is inuk, dual is inuuk, and plural is inuit. FoiledAgain

I think this is currently indeed a *terrible* article. The text completly misses the point by suggesting that even *if* some Inuit language has many words for snow, the same concepts can be expressed in English using phrases. As has been mentioned above, the text *also* completely misses the point by giving all kinds of English words for *non-snow* (berg, glacier, sleet, etc.) as examples of English words for snow.

What might be worth looking into is the largest number of words (not words-that-must-be-strung-together!) that any one Inuit-Aleut language has for snow, and comparing that with the number of words that English-speaking competitive *skiers* have for types of snow. (My guess is that the skiers need to have more fine-tuning than Eskimos typicallly do.)Daqu 00:06, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Key Issue: Why are WORDS important?

The issue of "number of words" are viewed as important because of a tacit assumption that the presence of words reflect actual cognitive distinctions. The problem is that the notion of "word", and especially words having something called "meaning" attached to it like a pendant, is increasingly seen to be false, e.g. in the field of cogntive semantics. Meaning resides in larger contextual chunks, which may include many meta-linguistic elements, and it is impossible to define the meaning of any word. Thus, this entire debate is placed at an earlier worldview in the evolution of our understanding of semantics, and perhaps is not as germane today.

In linguistics today, we find it difficult to answer simple undergraduate questions as to what constitutes and does not constitute, a word. According to Cognitive Semantics notions (e.g. Langacker), any string, however long, may be a "linguistic unit" if it's encoding - i.e. the phonological-semantic mapping - is entrenched, so that given the semantics, the phonology comes to mind immediately, and vice versa. That this applies to strings like green apple many people may agree with; but it may also apply to even larger strings like "months with 28 days". Thus, when you ask people "how many months have 28 days" they prefer to respond February rather than all 12 months.

This ambiguity on the status of "word" is hinted at in the article when it discusses the agglutinations in Intuit languages, but this needs to be elaborated. Mukerjee 05:10, 16 April 2006 (UTC)


On that note, the article uses the Term "polysynthetic." I think a more appropriate word is "agglutinative." My own, limited, understanding is that polysynthetic refers to producinging new lexical terms by combining already existing words (seatbelt, iceberg, snowball, etc). Whereas agglutinative refers to languages where mophemes are stung together with gramatic markings to make word-sentences (such as Turkic languages and many Native american languages do). Am I wrong on this?
-Rafngard 19:23, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Specificity

For an article to be useful, it must include specific details. By not providing any list of words from any Eskimo / Intuit language, the article is doing a disservice to its readers. E.g. the article discusses the use of enclitics on bases to agglutinate larger chains, but it does not give any list of roots (such a list did appear in earlier versions). As a result the reader emerges with a vague notion of the debate, without any specific evidence to pin things down.

Also, I agree with the "debunk the debunkers" proponents - Fedor, Exile, Sderose. The slant is so much in favour of demythifying the Linguistic Relativism position that it is perhaps an urban legend in itself... A small correction is called for. Mukerjee 05:19, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I am not a proponent of "debunking the debunkers" at all, but merely pointed out that some "urban legend debunkers" somewhat disagree that this is a true myth. This was inspired by a discussion I had with one of these who did not even want to consider the fact that inuit languages are polysynthetic. So, I insist that this is a true, or at least grossly exaggerated myth. Fedor 13:27, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] It's Worse than you think

Sometimes in popular myth, people speak (or even write) about Eskimo words for snow being not just in the hundreds, but in the thousands.Das Baz 16:11, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

...but the number of words is unlimited, that's the point. Did you read the whole article? —Keenan Pepper 18:45, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Polysynthetic"

It's irritating when people find out that a language is "polysynthetic" (or "agglutinative" or "isolating" or whatever) and then assume that they know a lot about its morphology. So we have this passage in the article:

This means that where an English speaker would describe what he or she is seeing as "soft, easily-packed snow", a speaker of an Eskimo language could describe the same thing in one word. And when the snow began to melt, she could change a few suffixes and describe, once again in one word, "soft, melting snow that is not easily-packed". If the snow became dirty, she could add a suffix and say, "soft, dirty, melting snow that is not easily-packed." All this in one word, where an English-speaker would need an entire phrase. And yet, the concept is the same in both languages.

I know something about Inuktitut, not nearly enough to translate these English phrases, but enough to be almost certain that these would not be single words in Inuktitut. There are quite strong limitations on what lexical content can be included within a word (as in other polysynthetic languages, as far as I know). And the idea that the number of words for snow is thereby "unlimited" is just silly. I actually don't think the fact that Eskimo languages are polysynthetic (and I would say that they are) is that relevant to the topic at hand. — MikeG (talk) 17:49, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 27 Albanian words for moustache?

The news item at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4248494.stm is about missing words in the English language. While the author makes no reference to Eskimos or words for snow he does offer that "Hawaiians have 108 words for sweet potato, 65 for fishing nets - and 47 for banana" and that "The Albanians [have] no fewer than 27 separate expressions for the moustache." Are these really different words, or just more confusion about compound words? 88.198.196.117 16:40, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

What, like 'nose-neighbor', 'push-broom', and 'Dr. Fuzzenstein?' —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.122.208.51 (talk) 19:01, 16 January 2007 (UTC).
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