Monday, September 11, 2006
The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
One of many popular myths about language is that according to which Eskimoan languages have maybe 50 or even 100 or more words to refer to different kinds of snow. As Geoff Pullum explains in his excellent entry on the highly recommended Language Log, there are in fact not that many roots for different kinds of snow; probably about the same amount as in English (snow, slush, blizzard, drift,...). What is special about Eskimoan languages is their enormous capacity for suffixation, allowing one to create an infinite number of word forms on the basis of one and the same root. Language Log offers many demystifications of this kind, as well as many thought-provoking observations about and analyses of everyday language use. The recent book Far from the madding gerund and other dispatches from language log (available from Amazon) collects some of the best entries to date.
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1 comment:
I can't believe that! I told my students about the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis earlier this year (in Brussels), and gave them this very example and the one about Albanian having twelve different words for moustache. This puts me to shame.
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