A program that I watch because I find it amusing came up with a new spin on the "Eskimos have x words for it" last night. New to me anyway.

The program is called QI and gives points for interesting answers but takes them away for obvious but wrong answers.
It's often amusing and erudite thanks to presenter Stephen Fry but sometimes gives an answer that sounds wrong to me.

Case in point.

Last night the question was

"What do the Eskimos have 32 words for?"

Sure enough someone answered "snow" and lost a lot of points. Stephen Fry went on to claim that there are 32 distinct demonstrative adjectives compared to our four (this/that/these/those). He gave a couple of examples which he said meant "that one in there", "that one up there" and "that one down there".

Of course he's repeating what the researchers tell him but it sounded to me as if the examples were just one more example of the way that the language makes compound words with modifiers where we would have single words. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that there is a single "word" meaning "all that snow down there".

Does anyone know if this assertion about demonstrative adjectives is true or just another load of poorly researched nonsense?

Part of the problem is the same as in the N words for snow meme: what constitutes a word (in the target language)? It's not as simple as it sounds. The Yupik and Inuit languages are what used to be called polysynthetic. These languages have complicated grammars where a single word maps to what in English would be a phrase or complete sentence. So, it's hard to cite words in these languages. What you get when you ask for a word is more like a phrase or a sentence. Not snow but that snow over there which is fresh. (I'm making these examples up.)

So, it may very well be that Inuit has a very complicated deictic system, (demonstrative pronouns). The question is how familiar with Inuit grammar do you have to be before any answer (e.g., 42) makes any sense.

That's exactly what I was getting at. Of course you explained it rather better.

I remember one article I read (in, I think, a Smithsonian book on language) that gave the example of a word that meant "many little fires in the house". The root was the word for a hearthfire as opposed to an outdoor fire. Then there was a modifier for plural, and a diminutive -- hearthfire-inos, more or less.

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