Language Log: Sasha Aikhenvald on Inuit snow words: a clarification

The story about Inuit (or Inuktitut, or Yup'ik, or more generally, Eskimo) words for snow is completely wrong. People say that speakers of these languages have 23, or 42, or 50, or 100 words for snow --- the numbers often seem to have been picked at random. The spread of the myth was tracked in a paper by Laura Martin (American Anthropologist 88 (1986), 418-423), and publicized more widely by a later humorous embroidering of the theme by G. K. Pullum (reprinted as chapter 19 of his 1991 book of essays The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). But the Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.

Language and mental categories are more than vocabulary. My wife can use much more words for colors than I do, yet I don't think she actually sees more colors than me - her additional vocabulary (taken from "real world items" in the fashion of rose and orange) makes sense to me.

I'd bet there would be more success looking for vocabulary determining conceptualisation in the more abstract categories of language - Do you have a conceptual category for your maternal cousins as opposed to your paternal ones ? Many people do...

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères