Prescriptivist Mark Halpern (he wrote this well-known piece 10 years ago) has something published on Language Log. He's just left a comment stating that he's not participating in the discussion any more. It's a shame, but not surprising since he generally doesn't like linguists.
Apparently in his new book, Language and Human Nature, which I haven't read, he claims that Eskimo languages really do have more words for snow than other languages.
Thanks for that, goofy and arnie. I haven't read the book, and prescriptivists get on my nerves, as my colleague would say. However, I have to say he posted a cogent discussion, and many of the responses were less than that. To be honest, there can be a "holier than thou" attitude with descriptivists sometimes. I guess at times prescriptivists can get on my nerves, too.
I have read about many of those Eskimo snow words. Can you please remind me, again, why they don't have more snow words than other places, or how we know that? I've just forgotten. It makes sense that they might, since they have so much more snow than people living elsewhere do.
Again, it's all about what a "word" is. "Words" in Eskimo languages aren't formed the same way English "words" are - Eskimo languages are agglutinative, which means they consist of a base to which affixes are added. Neither the base or the affixes are used in isolation, so they're not "words", but the "word" they form is often best translated into an English sentence. (hope I've got that right.)
That does not mean there are huge numbers of unrelated basic terms for huge numbers of finely differentiated snow types. It means that the notion of fixing a number of snow words, or even a definition of what a word for snow would be, is meaningless for these languages. You could write down not just thousands but millions of words built from roots that refer to snow if you had the time. But they would all be derivatives of a fairly small number of roots. And you could write down just as many derivatives of any other root: fish, or coffee, or excrement...
So, Eskimoan languages are really extraordinary in their productive word-building capability, for any root you might pick. But that very fact makes them exactly the wrong sort of language to ask vocabulary-size questions about, because those questions are virtually meaningless -- unless you ask them about basic non-derived roots, in which case the answers aren't particularly newsworthy.
This page makes the point that English has quite a lot of words for snow.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,
