(no subject)
Dear book that I am currently reading,
You are a book on language. Specifically, a popular history of the English language, but still, linguistics. Why, then, would you feel the need to repeat the claim that "Eskimos have 50 words for snow"?
I mean, for one thing, "Eskimo" covers...two languages and several dialects of Inuit, I think? It's a language family referring to several separate groups of people. It's not like the entire arctic circle is culturally homogeneous, come on.
And even if that wasn't true, that claim is just fundamentally wrong. You can create tons of different descriptive words for snow in the Inuit language, sure, but you can create descriptive words for just about anything by sticking other words together. It's like claiming that because we can refer to "a large ear of corn with those fluffy things coming out of it at the end," "corn on the cob," and "sweet yellow corn," English is a language of corn-obsessed lunatics. The only difference is that in Inuit they can stick the adjectives and nouns together to make one long word.
To put it another way, if you were making an Inuit dictionary you would put in the words for "snow", "wet", and "fluffy", but not a word for "wet, fluffy snow", despite the fact that that word can probably be created. It's called a polysynthetic language. The guy who started the urban legend didn't understand that.
And sure, the peoples we call Eskimos probably spend more time talking about snow that people in more temperate climates, but that's not nearly as interesting as saying that they have fifty different words for it. After all, we'll go on and on about the beauty of trees, because we've seen a lot of fucking trees and can appreciate the subtle differences. But we don't have specific words for every possible type of tree. It's the same thing with Eskimos and snow.
"Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you, frighten you?" -Tim Minchin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
You are a book on language. Specifically, a popular history of the English language, but still, linguistics. Why, then, would you feel the need to repeat the claim that "Eskimos have 50 words for snow"?
I mean, for one thing, "Eskimo" covers...two languages and several dialects of Inuit, I think? It's a language family referring to several separate groups of people. It's not like the entire arctic circle is culturally homogeneous, come on.
And even if that wasn't true, that claim is just fundamentally wrong. You can create tons of different descriptive words for snow in the Inuit language, sure, but you can create descriptive words for just about anything by sticking other words together. It's like claiming that because we can refer to "a large ear of corn with those fluffy things coming out of it at the end," "corn on the cob," and "sweet yellow corn," English is a language of corn-obsessed lunatics. The only difference is that in Inuit they can stick the adjectives and nouns together to make one long word.
To put it another way, if you were making an Inuit dictionary you would put in the words for "snow", "wet", and "fluffy", but not a word for "wet, fluffy snow", despite the fact that that word can probably be created. It's called a polysynthetic language. The guy who started the urban legend didn't understand that.
And sure, the peoples we call Eskimos probably spend more time talking about snow that people in more temperate climates, but that's not nearly as interesting as saying that they have fifty different words for it. After all, we'll go on and on about the beauty of trees, because we've seen a lot of fucking trees and can appreciate the subtle differences. But we don't have specific words for every possible type of tree. It's the same thing with Eskimos and snow.
"Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you, frighten you?" -Tim Minchin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow