No better example can be found than the controversial subject of how many words the Eskimo have for "snow." A Google search for "Eskimo snow words" yields more than 10,000 hits. Deriding this as an example of bad science run amok has become somewhat of a game among linguists. A leading academic in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax stated unequivocally that the Inuit people of Alaska do not have many words for snow, and in fact have only about a dozen basic ones. The debunkers rely on this count to show that the Inuit snow words are neither prolific nor special. This stance feeds into a more general agenda of asserting that all languages are equal and equally interesting to science.
Proponents of this view became so intent on debunking it that they spawned a new term―"snow clones"―to mock all such statements that "The so-and-so people have x number of words for y." Entire Web pages are devoted to listing such mock Eskimo snow words that have imaginary meanings like "snow mixed with husky shit" or "snow burger." Even Steven Pinker took up the issue in his book The Language Instinct, stating: "Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston's meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling."
Sadly, the snow-cloners have missed the point. They have grossly underestimated the number of words by relying on very limited modern accounts and thinking that just because the number was inflated in the past by people who should have known better, the true count must be unimpressively low. As we will see, the number of snow/ice/wind/weather terms in some Arctic languages is impressively vast, rich, and complex. Furthermore, they have missed the forest for the trees, failing to see the importance of how words encode knowledge. Beyond the sheer numbers of words for natural phenomena like snow and ice, these languages demonstrate the complex ways in which words package information efficiently.The preceding passage is from K. David Harrison's The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World's Most Endangered Languages. Harrison is a linguist who puts his money where his mouth is. And if his writings contain a trace of J. Peterman-style cosmopolitan bragging, there's also a passionate insight into the speakers of endangered languages.
Some Arctic languages do indeed have a large number of snow-related words. It's natural that we outsiders don't really appreciate the nuances between these, although we could try harder. People such as the Yupik are better equipped to see changes small and large reflected in the kind of precipitation that falls in their homelands.
And that's the thing. Languages aren't just collections of words. They're methods of interacting with the surrounding environment and making sense of it. There's not one that's equally good for all circumstances.
2 comments:
This sounds like an excellent take on the assumptions of modern people in relation to the way indigenous societies use language. I seem to remember having sent you a copy of one of David Abram's books, The Spell of the Sensuous, but maybe not. If not, I should have done because it's one of my favorites. He writes of a magical, yet scientific encounter with our earthly surroundings and how oral traditions work giving us a fascinating glimpse into how our languages originally come from the land.
Tapping into the ancient wisdom of oral and native cultures, Abram's outlines how the written word and phonetic language have contributed heavily to divorcing the modern western mind from the natural world. He describes what has been lost as humans have silenced the voices of the the earth's landscape. He says the abstraction of speech is a spell itself, no less magical, than understanding the song of the birds, or reading signs from the soil and trees.
The first chapter may be a bit overly lyrical for your taste, but he switches gears in the next to a somewhat more down to earth tone. I loved it myself but if you haven't read it and are curious I found a copy of it here.
btw: Thanks for setting me straight about that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon I sent you thinking it really was Watterson. Joe's Calvin & Muad’Dib comics are inspired and most delightful.
You actually did send me a copy of The Spell of the Sensuous. I haven't gotten my head around all of it, but I do appreciate that Abram appreciates the gaps in our contemporary understanding. He and Robinson do seem to have something in common, although the latter is more button-down in appearance.
Heck, the title Calvin and Muad'dib goes an awful long way in making it funny, which frees you up to explore the concept in other ways.
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