The alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos comports so
well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity:
rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal
blubber; throwing grandma out to be eaten by polar bears; â We are
prepared to believe almost anything about such an unfamiliar and
peculiar group,â says Martin, in a gentle reminder of our buried racist
tendencies.
The tale she tells is an embarrassing saga of scholarly sloppiness and
popular eagerness to embrace exotic facts about other peopleâs
languages without seeing the evidence. The fact is that the myth of the
multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind
of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological
linguistics community on itself.
The original source is Franz Boasâ introduction to The Handbook of
North American Indians (1911). And all Boas says there, in the context
of a low-key and slightly ill-explained discussion of independent versus derived terms for things in different languages, is that just as English uses separate roots 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 âwaterâ in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput âsnow on the groundâ, qana âfalling snowâ, piqsirpoq âdrifting snowâ, and qimuqsuq âa snow driftâ. Boasâ point is simply that English expresses these notions by phrases involving the root snow, but things could have been otherwise, just as the words for lake, river, etc. could have been formed derivationally or periphrastically on the root water.Â
But with the next twist in the story, the unleashing of the
xenomorphic fable of Eskimo lexicography seems to have become
inevitable. What happened was that Benjamin Lee Whorf, Connecticut
fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier, picked up
Boasâ example and used it, vaguely, in his 1940 amateur linguistics
article 'Science and linguistics,â which was published in MITâs
promotional magazine Technology Review (Whorf was an alumnus; he
had done his B.S. in chemical engineering at MIT).
Our word snow would seem too inclusive to an Eskimo, our man
from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company confidently asserts. With
an uncanny perception into the hearts and minds of the hardy Arctic
denizens (the more uncanny since Eskimos were not a prominent
feature of Hartfordâs social scene at the time), he avers:Â
âWe have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow â whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different.â [âŚ]
Notice that Whorfâs statement has illicitly inflated Boasâ four terms
to at least seven (1: âfallingâ, 2: âon the groundâ, 3: âpacked hardâ,
4: âslushyâ, 5: âflyingâ, 6, 7 âŚ. : âand other kinds of snowâ). Notice
also that his claims about English speakers are false; I recall the stuff in question being called âsnowâ when fluffy and white, âslushâ when partly melted, âsleetâ when falling in a half-melted state, and a âblizzardâ when pelting down hard enough to make driving dangerous. Whorfâs remark about his own speech community is no more reliable than his glib generalizations about what things are âsensuously and operationally differentâ to the generic Eskimo.Â
But the lack of little things like verisimilitude and substantiation are
not enough to stop a myth. Martin tracks the great Eskimo vocabulary
hoax through successively more careless repetitions and embroiderings in a number of popular books on language. [âŚ]
But never mind: three, four, seven, who cares? Itâs a bunch, right?
Once more popular sources start to get hold of the example, all
constraints are removed: arbitrary numbers are just made up as the writer thinks appropriate for the readership. [âŚ]
Among the many depressing things about this credulous transmission
and elaboration of a false claim is that even if there were a large
number of roots for different snow types in some Arctic language, this
would not, objectively, be intellectually interesting; it would be a most
mundane and unremarkable fact.
Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of
horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have
names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for
different fonts (Caslon, Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough. If these obvious truths of specialization are
supposed to be interesting facts about language, thought, and culture,
then Iâm sorry, but include me out.
Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop
we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a
random textbook like Paul Gaengâs Introduction to the Principles of
Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: âIt is quite obvious that in
the culture of the Eskimos⌠snow is of great enough importance to
split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one
thought in English into several distinct classesâŚâ (p. 137). Imagine
reading: âIt is quite obvious that in the culture of printers.., fonts are
of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that
corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into
several distinct classesâŚâ Utterly boring, if even true. Only the link
to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the icepacks could permit something this trite to be presented to us for
contemplation.
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