"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."
This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.
Indeed, I looked at some highly scored words for Polish in google translate and they are words where the foreign word, transliterations into Polish, and Polish word are used. And when you pare it down to say five real distinctive meanings, you often find similar less commonly used synonyms in English. Also as I was looking through it seemed that possibly it was not taking into consideration verb vs. noun in English cause the counts seemed oddly way off for some where it could have happened. If you are familiar with English and another language, I would like to know what you see.
I happened to write my bachelors thesis on the effect of mother-tongues on cognitive processes in 2012 and found the literature very vague on this issue.
At the time the literature suggested that the cognitive processes are the same across populations of different mother-tongues but that language can influence the data those processes work upon, EG: exposed to the same events, what details get picked up, built into narratives and remembered.
I would move that language constitutes a very strong mnemonic anchor if nothing else.
I was participant in an fMRI study (done as PhD work by a computational linguist) that contrasted native speakers of German and Polish, showing that phonemes that exist in your native tongue are processed in different areas of your brain than phonemes that are non-native to you.
Boas claimed in 1884 that the Inuit language on Baffin Island had four words for snow. The "100" was inflated through re-telling. And that number has been thoroughly refuted. Of course. Inuit languages don't have 100 different roots for snow.
As for "four".. well, English has several too (snow, sleet, slush, firn..), and most other languages from regions where snow exists have a number of such words. Nothing new there.
Not arguing against the idea that the Inuit have many more words for snow. But in english their are many commonly understood equivalents. Even more if you're into the snow sport scene that may reach Inuit levels.
Common words off the top of my head:
Snow on the ground: Snowpack, hardpack, powder, crust, crud, piste
A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.
If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more.
Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.
>A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.
A lot of that is because we use multi-word phrases instead of single words to express a lot of ideas too. Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. Often we have a word but the other person just isn't familiar with it and assumes it doesn't exist, or assumes it's not known because it was borrowed into English.
> Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words.
The Romans believed that philosophy had to be done in Greek because Latin wasn't suited to the field.
There is a speech (letter?) by Cicero railing against the belief, in which he demonstrates that it's possible and in fact easy to use Latin for all of the concepts that are supposed to be restricted to Greek.
A related annoyance is when people expect words in other languages to have exactly one clear (if not necessarily narrow) meaning (or spelling, pronunciation, etc.), even though English doesn't.
Other languages, especially languages that people actually used and that interacted with many other languages, are every bit as prone to complication as English.
This seems like a really funny concept to me, that any language should be pure. How many millennia do we need to go back for purity? What is untainted English? Only words from the Angles?
Every language in contact with other languages borrows words. Many of the French words in English come from Gaulish, for example bard. In tun there are also many Celtic words from before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain that are preserved. The Franks themselves who later influenced English were Germanic people moving into a formerly Roman-Celtic region who adopted a kind of Latin. Further confusing this, the Anglo-Saxons spoke a language that that was carrying some words from West Baltic languages like the word for awl.
The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.
> The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.
Agreed. French, of course, is 100% impure if we're supposed to think that way.. it didn't exist a dozen centuries or so ago, all its words are from Latin and regional languages, and so on. And of course other languages are like that too.
When I try to interpret this generously, I wonder if you’re suggesting that the Inuit languages in question would be less prone to crossover with other languages?
I wonder how much linguistic distance there is between Inuit languages in the region as compared to, say, Romance languages in Western Europe.
Also human subjectivity makes it kind of impossible to do this sort analysis in a systematic way that yields an apples-to-apples comparison. How do you properly account for slang or figurative language in a way that works consistently across languages when every dictionary you might use is maintained by a different group of people with different editorial standards?
And then, yes, agglutination. What's way more interesting to me than how many words Inuktitut or Chinese have for snow is the way the very structure of these languages illustrates how ill-defined a concept "word" is in the first place. You might think you know what it means in English, and that might transfer reasonably well to other Indo-European languages, but as you go further afield you start to see more and more examples where the concept needs heavy modification to remain useful.
It feels like maybe that t-shirt misses the point.
For example, "avalanche" is not a word for snow. It's a word for a specific event involving snow. Having a word that meant "snow that is likely to cause an avalanche" actually would be a useful concept that isn't present in English.
in a polysynthetic language like inuit, "words" aren't really a useful category to measure. i'd hedge my bets the amount of words for snow approaches infinity. do they perhaps mean "roots"?
One way to improve the rigor of this research would be to embed each word in each language in a common latent space then look for clusters.
But creating that latent space and the corresponding embedding algorithm is hard in the first place. Today’s embedding models could be terrible for the fringe languages this research is about, and we wouldn’t know because we don’t know how to evaluate overall semantic accuracy.
This is somewhat similar to the language vector embedding, isn't it?
And the article asks the reasonable question "what is the difference between having a single word for a thing versus a commonly understood cluster of words?". It's not a hard boundary.
Every translation loses a little bit of information but potentially brings in different connotations. The things that translators and localizers argue about endlessly: do we look for the words that most closely match the other words, or do we look for feeling and meaning that most closely matches the original intent?
There are about a dozen types of snow. It’s quite reasonable for people who care about the difference to be able to describe them in language. Anyone who has shoveled snow can tell you there’s a difference between a cold light snow and a heavy wet snow. Anyone who has walked on snow crust can recall the feeling.
Ask anyone who skis what his favorite type of snow is. His least favorite: Champaign powder, fat wet flakes, cold fluff, icy crust, I could probably talk for an hour about the different types of snow and the conditions that lead to them. Some types of snow lead to avalanche conditions. Some are dangerous to drive in. Some are a dream to ski, some make you turn around and go home.
Maybe we don’t have singular words for it, but we certainly can describe the differences in language. It would be insane to think otherwise.
I am reminded of the humorous quote from Douglas Adams' novel "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish":
Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.
It's funny but makes a decent argument for the same thing you are. Seems perfectly natural to me.
(Also, any excuse to quote Douglas Adams is worth it...)
I don't think anyone ever posited that it's impossible to describe the differences. Only that some languages optimize for things that they encounter regularly.
With respect to snow and snow-related things, I actually ran into this personally. That thick icy crust on snow that you've described in your comment - it has a dedicated word for it in Russian, наст (nast). It never occurred to me that there isn't an equivalent single word for that in English in 20 years of living in English-speaking countries because it simply doesn't occur in the areas where I live. Until, one day, it did, and I realized that I have to explain-translate it.
(Some other languages that have a dedicated word for that are Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian)
when discussing the Inuit, or way up far north people, it is important to recognise there many indipendently invented technologys, and the language to go with them.
I was very surprised one day to encounter snow that would in fact be suitable to cut into blocks and used structuraly.It is not like any other snow
and is composed of a wind blown deposit, but I suspect that the exaxt conditions for the creation and bonding of the particles are rare @ the 45th paralell where I live.
As to language comanalities and roots, ya sure whatever, it is clear that language is inate, and there are endless spontainious dialects and outright new languages poping up, and at ond point someone had a list of actual languages that had less speakers than klingon.
And generational and class cultural boundry's demand some way to keep secrets and invent ways to create a comunication system that allows for planning a friday night after work shindig, blow the roof off, but you still want to sit and chat with grandma.....so
i can come up with more than 50 words for snow in english without problem. While some of the types you name don't get a word in english many others do.
So someone named Geoff Pullum called this a hoax. Now that claim may be wrong. Did the journalist find some explanation of why Pullum said that? I'm curious.
Here is his essay, if you’re wondering! It’s short and zippy and pretty fun—has the flavor of that slightly smug, sarcastic, sassy contrarianism of the New Atheists’ writing in that time—
> What i do here is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986. Laura Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Cleveland State University. She endures calmly the fact that virtually no one listened to her when she first published. It may be that few will listen to me as I explain in different words to another audience what she pointed out. But the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said they do. Anyone who insists on simply checking their primary sources will find that they are quite unable to document the alleged facts about snow vocabulary (but nobody ever checks, because the truth might not be what the reading public wants to hear).
Skiers also have many words for snow: powder, slush, corn, corduroy, crust, ice (not ice), blue ice (actually ice), windpack, popcorn (unrelated to "corn"), and of course the California favorite: cement.
Borders and migration aren't about a single trait like language, there are many countries worldwide where either the only or primary language is the same, but they're distinctly different countries when it comes to most anything else. Culture and identity are much wider concepts than simply the ability to speak.
There are also many countries where the primary language is the same only because of concerted efforts by the central government to force it upon everyone and to wipe out regional languages and dialects, usually in the past couple centuries or so. France, Spain, Italy are all examples.
> Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’
Abstract from the cited paper [0]:
> our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce non-obvious and well-grounded insights about language and culture.
I think I'll continue to be sceptical of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Since this parent post is getting downvoted, maybe I should have elaborated: the claims in the title of this article ("proof of X") seem to be a lot stronger than the actual research paper it references ("suggests that X").
This subject is something that has been discussed for over a century (to be honest I'm not sure how much it's been considered seriously by linguists in recent years, but hey, I remember it being brought up back in LING201).
The title of the article just seems a bit extreme to me, as if the debate around linguistic relativity is over now that someone ran a counter over some bilingual dictionaries. It's an interesting approach, and maybe it can give some direction into where to look, but I think we'd need a lot more than numerical analysis on dictionaries to prove something about language, and we need to account for other causes of correlations.
Eg, bilingual dictionaries (which this research analyses) are likely to be compiled by people who are aware of these claims about their language. If you're creating a dictionary for a language that is known for having "X words for snow", you'll put more effort into listing many words for snow than many words for taste. Note that bilingual dictionaries often exist for language learning purposes, so they intentionally won't paint a complete picture of the language.
https://archive.md/YYH8X
"The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration,” in which a language has many words related to a core concept. It’s the same phenomenon that fueled the Inuit debate. But this study brings a twist: rather than the number of words, it measured their proportion, the slice of dictionary real estate taken up by a concept."
This seems inadequate to make the kinds of claims the researchers are quoted as asserting in the article.
Indeed, I looked at some highly scored words for Polish in google translate and they are words where the foreign word, transliterations into Polish, and Polish word are used. And when you pare it down to say five real distinctive meanings, you often find similar less commonly used synonyms in English. Also as I was looking through it seemed that possibly it was not taking into consideration verb vs. noun in English cause the counts seemed oddly way off for some where it could have happened. If you are familiar with English and another language, I would like to know what you see.
I happened to write my bachelors thesis on the effect of mother-tongues on cognitive processes in 2012 and found the literature very vague on this issue.
At the time the literature suggested that the cognitive processes are the same across populations of different mother-tongues but that language can influence the data those processes work upon, EG: exposed to the same events, what details get picked up, built into narratives and remembered.
I would move that language constitutes a very strong mnemonic anchor if nothing else.
I was participant in an fMRI study (done as PhD work by a computational linguist) that contrasted native speakers of German and Polish, showing that phonemes that exist in your native tongue are processed in different areas of your brain than phonemes that are non-native to you.
I would be interested in reading that.
So, the Innuit may not have 100 words for "snow" after all. But the Hacker's Dictionary really does contain 216 synonyms for "broken".
[*] https://hackersdictionary.com/html/index.html
Boas claimed in 1884 that the Inuit language on Baffin Island had four words for snow. The "100" was inflated through re-telling. And that number has been thoroughly refuted. Of course. Inuit languages don't have 100 different roots for snow. As for "four".. well, English has several too (snow, sleet, slush, firn..), and most other languages from regions where snow exists have a number of such words. Nothing new there.
They have a few.
Aput: Snow on the ground. Qana: Falling snow. Piqsirpoq: Drifting snow. Kaniq: Frost. Kanevvluk: Fine snow. Muruaneq: Soft deep snow. Nutaryuk: Fresh snow. Pirta: Blizzard. Qengaruk: Snow bank.
Not arguing against the idea that the Inuit have many more words for snow. But in english their are many commonly understood equivalents. Even more if you're into the snow sport scene that may reach Inuit levels.
Common words off the top of my head:
Snow on the ground: Snowpack, hardpack, powder, crust, crud, piste
Falling snow: snowing, sleet, blizzard, snowstorm.
Drifting snow: snowdrift.
Frost: frost.
Modern scene lingo Pow, corduroy, granular, chunder, cornice etc
Graupel
I think Finnish also has quite many.
Looks like an older version (4.3.0) of The Jargon File page I'm aware of (4.4.7): http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/
That is somehow fitting, given that the 'maintainer' is also thoroughly broken.
The data exploration tool linked-to from the article:
https://charleskemp.com/code/lexicalelaboration.html
Flake, avalanche, snow, zastrugi, powder, firn, dump, pillow, iceberg, chop, snowball, flurry, yukimarimo, piste, ice, snirt, corn, blizzard, cornice, drift, freshie, smud, penitentes, frost, hardpack, slurry, berm, chowder, hoar, icicle, neve, slush, styrofoam, glacier, sleet, graupel, crust, crud, dendrites
I heard the Eskimos have over 50 words for a bad example
^ my favorite t-shirt.
So many of these studies also abuse compound words and misunderstand agglutination to produce their shocking counts.
A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.
If you want the verb "love", you can cherish, adore, treasure, adulate, worship, dote, or delight in. For the noun, you can feel ardor, passion, eros, devotion, respect. You can feel lust, or infatuation. If you aren't feeling creative, a thesaurus will have plenty more.
Not all of these have meanings identical to "love", but rather suggest different shades of meaning, formality, and approval. This is the major purpose of synonyms.
>A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.
A lot of that is because we use multi-word phrases instead of single words to express a lot of ideas too. Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. Often we have a word but the other person just isn't familiar with it and assumes it doesn't exist, or assumes it's not known because it was borrowed into English.
The single-word for the concept of 'brotherly love' in english is 'camaraderie' in traditional usage or 'bromance' in colloquial American english.
> Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words.
The Romans believed that philosophy had to be done in Greek because Latin wasn't suited to the field.
There is a speech (letter?) by Cicero railing against the belief, in which he demonstrates that it's possible and in fact easy to use Latin for all of the concepts that are supposed to be restricted to Greek.
Apparently nobody learned anything from this.
A related annoyance is when people expect words in other languages to have exactly one clear (if not necessarily narrow) meaning (or spelling, pronunciation, etc.), even though English doesn't.
Other languages, especially languages that people actually used and that interacted with many other languages, are every bit as prone to complication as English.
Most of those words are only because English has been tainted by other languages.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
This seems like a really funny concept to me, that any language should be pure. How many millennia do we need to go back for purity? What is untainted English? Only words from the Angles?
You may find Anglish amusing, then:
https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
What's funny is my initial impression of Anglish is that it reminds me a lot of German.
Given English's "pure" roots, that should probably be entirely unsurprising.
Not surprising, it is a Germanic language.
West Germanic, Anglo Frisian to be precise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages
Well, that wordbook is mighty bewitching.
Every language in contact with other languages borrows words. Many of the French words in English come from Gaulish, for example bard. In tun there are also many Celtic words from before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain that are preserved. The Franks themselves who later influenced English were Germanic people moving into a formerly Roman-Celtic region who adopted a kind of Latin. Further confusing this, the Anglo-Saxons spoke a language that that was carrying some words from West Baltic languages like the word for awl.
The idea that there are pure languages, is ridiculous.
Right. Even Latin had a lot of Etruscan vocabulary and used the Etruscan alphabet.
When I try to interpret this generously, I wonder if you’re suggesting that the Inuit languages in question would be less prone to crossover with other languages?
I wonder how much linguistic distance there is between Inuit languages in the region as compared to, say, Romance languages in Western Europe.
Might not be that large, depending on which region we're talking about. From what I've heard, Inuit expansion in the arctic is a fairly recent event.
Fun fact: Ancestors of the modern Inuit people arrived at Greenland after Vikings did!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_people
> Fun fact: Ancestors of the modern Inuit people arrived at Greenland after Vikings did!
The Egyptians left records, and pictures, of the peoples to their south, with whom they engaged variously in diplomacy, trade, and military conflict.
Those peoples are now extinct, with more recent arrivals occupying their land.
Is your language pure? The word for pineapples is ananas in just about every language besides English.
Don't come at me unless you're speaking the original proto-Indo-European.
Also human subjectivity makes it kind of impossible to do this sort analysis in a systematic way that yields an apples-to-apples comparison. How do you properly account for slang or figurative language in a way that works consistently across languages when every dictionary you might use is maintained by a different group of people with different editorial standards?
And then, yes, agglutination. What's way more interesting to me than how many words Inuktitut or Chinese have for snow is the way the very structure of these languages illustrates how ill-defined a concept "word" is in the first place. You might think you know what it means in English, and that might transfer reasonably well to other Indo-European languages, but as you go further afield you start to see more and more examples where the concept needs heavy modification to remain useful.
It feels like maybe that t-shirt misses the point.
For example, "avalanche" is not a word for snow. It's a word for a specific event involving snow. Having a word that meant "snow that is likely to cause an avalanche" actually would be a useful concept that isn't present in English.
I like you t-shirt but I am kinda disappointed the list is 39 words but I guess it conveys the point.
in a polysynthetic language like inuit, "words" aren't really a useful category to measure. i'd hedge my bets the amount of words for snow approaches infinity. do they perhaps mean "roots"?
The technical claim about Inuit is indeed about roots, not words.
One way to improve the rigor of this research would be to embed each word in each language in a common latent space then look for clusters.
But creating that latent space and the corresponding embedding algorithm is hard in the first place. Today’s embedding models could be terrible for the fringe languages this research is about, and we wouldn’t know because we don’t know how to evaluate overall semantic accuracy.
Am I off piste here?
This is somewhat similar to the language vector embedding, isn't it?
And the article asks the reasonable question "what is the difference between having a single word for a thing versus a commonly understood cluster of words?". It's not a hard boundary.
Every translation loses a little bit of information but potentially brings in different connotations. The things that translators and localizers argue about endlessly: do we look for the words that most closely match the other words, or do we look for feeling and meaning that most closely matches the original intent?
Seeing the maps was interesting. Pretty sure there are like 2 dozen words for weed…
I can’t find the actual words. I’d like to see the four french synonyms for abandonment that they counted.
There are about a dozen types of snow. It’s quite reasonable for people who care about the difference to be able to describe them in language. Anyone who has shoveled snow can tell you there’s a difference between a cold light snow and a heavy wet snow. Anyone who has walked on snow crust can recall the feeling.
Ask anyone who skis what his favorite type of snow is. His least favorite: Champaign powder, fat wet flakes, cold fluff, icy crust, I could probably talk for an hour about the different types of snow and the conditions that lead to them. Some types of snow lead to avalanche conditions. Some are dangerous to drive in. Some are a dream to ski, some make you turn around and go home.
Maybe we don’t have singular words for it, but we certainly can describe the differences in language. It would be insane to think otherwise.
I am reminded of the humorous quote from Douglas Adams' novel "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish":
Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.
It's funny but makes a decent argument for the same thing you are. Seems perfectly natural to me.
(Also, any excuse to quote Douglas Adams is worth it...)
I don't think anyone ever posited that it's impossible to describe the differences. Only that some languages optimize for things that they encounter regularly.
With respect to snow and snow-related things, I actually ran into this personally. That thick icy crust on snow that you've described in your comment - it has a dedicated word for it in Russian, наст (nast). It never occurred to me that there isn't an equivalent single word for that in English in 20 years of living in English-speaking countries because it simply doesn't occur in the areas where I live. Until, one day, it did, and I realized that I have to explain-translate it.
(Some other languages that have a dedicated word for that are Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian)
Szreń is a modern construct, unlike in Russian:
https://nck.pl/projekty-kulturalne/projekty/ojczysty-dodaj-d...
Interesting, thank you! I take it this meaning entered the vernacular from weather reports on TV and such?
when discussing the Inuit, or way up far north people, it is important to recognise there many indipendently invented technologys, and the language to go with them. I was very surprised one day to encounter snow that would in fact be suitable to cut into blocks and used structuraly.It is not like any other snow and is composed of a wind blown deposit, but I suspect that the exaxt conditions for the creation and bonding of the particles are rare @ the 45th paralell where I live. As to language comanalities and roots, ya sure whatever, it is clear that language is inate, and there are endless spontainious dialects and outright new languages poping up, and at ond point someone had a list of actual languages that had less speakers than klingon. And generational and class cultural boundry's demand some way to keep secrets and invent ways to create a comunication system that allows for planning a friday night after work shindig, blow the roof off, but you still want to sit and chat with grandma.....so
i can come up with more than 50 words for snow in english without problem. While some of the types you name don't get a word in english many others do.
So someone named Geoff Pullum called this a hoax. Now that claim may be wrong. Did the journalist find some explanation of why Pullum said that? I'm curious.
Here is his essay, if you’re wondering! It’s short and zippy and pretty fun—has the flavor of that slightly smug, sarcastic, sassy contrarianism of the New Atheists’ writing in that time—
https://cslc.nd.edu/assets/141348/pullum_eskimo_vocabhoax.pd...
> What i do here is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986. Laura Martin is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Cleveland State University. She endures calmly the fact that virtually no one listened to her when she first published. It may be that few will listen to me as I explain in different words to another audience what she pointed out. But the truth is that the Eskimos do not have lots of different words for snow, and no one who knows anything about Eskimo (or more accurately, about the Inuit and Yupik families of related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever said they do. Anyone who insists on simply checking their primary sources will find that they are quite unable to document the alleged facts about snow vocabulary (but nobody ever checks, because the truth might not be what the reading public wants to hear).
Also worth noting that Pullum is a well-known linguist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_K._Pullum
(and there is a Wikipedia page for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)
Skiers also have many words for snow: powder, slush, corn, corduroy, crust, ice (not ice), blue ice (actually ice), windpack, popcorn (unrelated to "corn"), and of course the California favorite: cement.
dust on crust, firn, mashed potatoes (with or without gravy), graupel, chowder, crud, packed powder, blower pow, chop, fluff, smoke, ...
[flagged]
[flagged]
Borders and migration aren't about a single trait like language, there are many countries worldwide where either the only or primary language is the same, but they're distinctly different countries when it comes to most anything else. Culture and identity are much wider concepts than simply the ability to speak.
There are also many countries where the primary language is the same only because of concerted efforts by the central government to force it upon everyone and to wipe out regional languages and dialects, usually in the past couple centuries or so. France, Spain, Italy are all examples.
Mandarin is another example. Not easy to find a Cantonese dictionary despite having more speakers than Italian.
If you're going to say things like that you should spell out what you mean.
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Article title:
> Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’
Abstract from the cited paper [0]:
> our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce non-obvious and well-grounded insights about language and culture.
I think I'll continue to be sceptical of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
[0] https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2
Since this parent post is getting downvoted, maybe I should have elaborated: the claims in the title of this article ("proof of X") seem to be a lot stronger than the actual research paper it references ("suggests that X").
This subject is something that has been discussed for over a century (to be honest I'm not sure how much it's been considered seriously by linguists in recent years, but hey, I remember it being brought up back in LING201).
The title of the article just seems a bit extreme to me, as if the debate around linguistic relativity is over now that someone ran a counter over some bilingual dictionaries. It's an interesting approach, and maybe it can give some direction into where to look, but I think we'd need a lot more than numerical analysis on dictionaries to prove something about language, and we need to account for other causes of correlations.
Eg, bilingual dictionaries (which this research analyses) are likely to be compiled by people who are aware of these claims about their language. If you're creating a dictionary for a language that is known for having "X words for snow", you'll put more effort into listing many words for snow than many words for taste. Note that bilingual dictionaries often exist for language learning purposes, so they intentionally won't paint a complete picture of the language.