The "Eskimo words for snow" claim is a widespread misconception alleging that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. In fact, the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does.[1][2] In contrast, the European Sami People, an indigenous circumpolar group, do have hundreds of words for snow.[3][4][5]
Languages in the Inuit/Innu language group add suffixes to words to express the same concepts expressed in English and many other languages by means of compound words, phrases, and even entire sentences. One can create a practically unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages on any topic, not just snow, and these same concepts can be expressed in other languages using combinations of words. It is therefore not relevant or meaningful to compare the number of words between languages that create words in different ways due to different grammatical structures.[1][6][7] Most linguists today consider it a myth that Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow.
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The first reference to Inuit having multiple words for snow is in the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. He says:
...just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning 'water' in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput 'snow on the ground', gana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift'
The essential morphological question is why a language would say, for example, "lake", "river", and "brook" instead of something like "waterplace", "waterfast", and "waterslow". English has more than one snow-related word, but Boas' intent may have been to connect differences in culture with differences in language.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativity holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world. This idea is also reflected in the concept behind General Semantics. In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having seven distinct words for snow. Later writers inflated the figure in sensationalized stories: by 1978, the number quoted had reached fifty, and on February 9, 1984, an unsigned editorial in The New York Times gave the number as one hundred.[8]
The idea that Inuit had so many words for snow has given rise to the idea that Inuit 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 Inuit 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.
Part of the supposition is that Eskimo languages would have a focal vocabulary with several extra words to describe snow, which is specifically the point of Boas's theory. 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 are observing two different objects, nor does it mean that the artist would be confused by the idea that oil paint and acrylic paint are related. Likewise in English, the words "blizzard", "flurry", "pack", "slush," "drift", "sleet," and "powder" refer to different types of snow, but all are recognized as varieties of "snow" in a general sense.
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. These languages may have more or fewer words for "snow", depending on which language is considered.
There are several issues regarding the definition of "word":
By some definitions of "word", the number of Eskimo words for snow is approximately as large as the number of English sentences that can contain the word "snow", because Eskimo languages (like many native North American languages) are polysynthetic. Polysynthetic languages allow noun incorporation, resulting in a single compound word that is the equivalent of a phrase in other languages (Spencer 1991). The Eskimo languages have systems of derivational suffixes for word formation to which speakers can recursively add snow-referring roots. As in English, there are 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", much as an English speaker might use "sleet" and "sleet-covered". Arguably 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".
A word may be a compound and a compound may have a space in it. Thus, a word may have a space in it.
A dictionary definition of compound is 'a word made of words' like firefighter, study hour, and left-handed.[9] Thus, high school (with a space) is one word.
English compound elements that are themselves English words may be written open (e.g. particle board), hyphenated (e.g. particle-board), or solid (e.g. particleboard).[10]
A word pair over time often becomes a compound, definitely so in English when the primary stress is on the first element.[11]