Eskimo words for snow
Encyclopedia
The "Eskimo words for snow" claim is a widespread misconception alleging that Eskimo
s 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. In contrast, the European Sami People
, an indigenous circumpolar group, do have hundreds of words for snow.
Languages in the Inuit/Innu language group add suffix
es 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. Most linguists today consider it a myth that Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow.
Franz Boas
. He says:
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.
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.
s 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.
":
n 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 dictionary definition of compound is 'a word made of words' like firefighter, study hour, and left-handed. 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).
A word pair over time often becomes a compound, definitely so in English when the primary stress
is on the first element.
Eskimo
Eskimos or Inuit–Yupik peoples are indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the circumpolar region from eastern Siberia , across Alaska , Canada, and Greenland....
s have an unusually large number of words for snow
Snow
Snow is a form of precipitation within the Earth's atmosphere in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. Since snow is composed of small ice particles, it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by...
. In fact, the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does. In contrast, the European Sami People
Sami people
The Sami people, also spelled Sámi, or Saami, are the arctic indigenous people inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of far northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway. The Sámi are Europe’s northernmost...
, an indigenous circumpolar group, do have hundreds of words for snow.
Languages in the Inuit/Innu language group add suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es 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
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
structures. Most linguists today consider it a myth that Inuit have an unusually large number of words for snow.
Origins and significance
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 anthropologistAnthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
. He says:
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
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics....
and Benjamin Whorf
Benjamin Whorf
In studying the cause of a fire which had started under the conditions just described, Whorf concluded that it was thinking of the "empty" gasoline drums as "empty" in the meaning described in the first definition above, that is as "inert," which led to a fire he investigated...
's hypothesis of linguistic relativity
Linguistic relativity
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
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
General Semantics
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920's that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski fully launched the program as...
. 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
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
gave the number as one hundred.
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.
Focal vocabulary hypothesis
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 artistArtist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
s have more words to describe the various details of their profession — what a non-artist calls "paint", the artist identifies as "oil paint
Oil paint
Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil, commonly linseed oil. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the...
", "acrylic paint
Acrylic paint
Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry...
", or "watercolor
Watercolor painting
Watercolor or watercolour , also aquarelle from French, is a painting method. A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle...
". 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
Blizzard
A blizzard is a severe snowstorm characterized by strong winds. By definition, the difference between blizzard and a snowstorm is the strength of the wind. To be a blizzard, a snow storm must have winds in excess of with blowing or drifting snow which reduces visibility to 400 meters or ¼ mile or...
", "flurry
Snow flurry
A snow flurry is a brief instance of light snow, with very little or no accumulation of snow on the ground.-External links:* *...
", "pack", "slush," "drift", "sleet," and "powder" refer to different types of snow
Types of snow
Types of snow can be designated by the shape of its flakes, description of how it is falling, and by how it collects on the ground. A blizzard and snow storm indicate heavy snowfalls over a large area, snow squalls give heavy snowfalls over narrow bands, while flurries are used for the lightest...
, but all are recognized as varieties of "snow" in a general sense.
Defining "Eskimo"
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.Word boundary issues
There are several issues regarding the definition of "wordWord
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
":
- InflectionInflectionIn grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
can create several permutations of the same rootRoot (linguistics)The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
(lexemeLexemeA lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...
). (Most writers count lexemes, not inflectional variants, in their comparisons.) - Polysynthetic languagePolysynthetic languageIn linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
s can mechanistically combine what would be several words in a phrasePhraseIn everyday speech, a phrase may refer to any group of words. In linguistics, a phrase is a group of words which form a constituent and so function as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. A phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than a clause....
in another language into a single "word". - English compoundEnglish compoundA compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme.English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components.-Compound nouns:...
s and compoundsCompound (linguistics)In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
in other languages can be written with a space, creating controversy over whether a "word" should be defined by an orthographic word divider or by lexeme status (whether a compound has an independent entry in a dictionary or lexiconLexiconIn linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
). - The same morphemeMorphemeIn linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
can appear in multiple lexemes, creating controversy over whether the lexemes are sufficiently "different".
Eskimo word synthesis
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 AmericaNorth America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
n languages) are polysynthetic
Polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
. Polysynthetic languages allow noun incorporation
Incorporation (linguistics)
Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a word, usually a verb, forms a kind of compound with, for instance, its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function....
, resulting in a single compound word
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
that is the equivalent of a phrase in other languages (Spencer 1991). The Eskimo languages have systems of derivational suffixes
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
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
Inuinnaqtun
Inuinnaqtun , is an indigenous Inuit language of Canada and a dialect of Inuvialuktun. It is related very closely to Inuktitut, and some scholars, such as Richard Condon, believe that Inuinnaqtun is more appropriately classified as a dialect of Inuktitut...
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".
Compounding and orthography
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. 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).
A word pair over time often becomes a compound, definitely so in English when the primary stress
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
is on the first element.
Further reading
- Cichocki, Piotr and Marcin Kilarski (2010). "On 'Eskimo Words for Snow': The life cycle of a linguistic misconception". Historiographia Linguistica 37 (3), 341–377. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/hl/2010/00000037/00000003/art00003
- Martin, Laura (1986). "Eskimo Words for Snow: A case study in the genesis and decay of an anthropological example". American Anthropologist 88 (2), 418-23. http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/LauraMartinEskimoSnowWords.pdf
- Pullum, Geoffrey K.Geoffrey PullumGeoffrey Keith "Geoff" Pullum is a British-American linguist specialising in the study of English. , he is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh....
(1991). The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. University of Chicago Press. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=59325
External links
- Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation from Language LogLanguage LogLanguage Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman.The site is updated daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search results are frequently used as a...
- "Eskimo" words for snow by Steven DeRoseSteven DeRoseSteven J DeRose is a computer scientist with a significant history of contributions to Computational Linguistics and to key standards related to document processing, mostly around ISO's Standard Generalized Markup Language and W3C's Extensible Markup Language .His contributions include the...
, including English lists - Snow' lexemes in Yup'ik (reposted)
- Listing various polysynthetic Eskimo words