Hell will freeze over before Eskimo `snow' myth melts

January 17, 2007|By Nathan Bierma, Special to the Tribune.

One of the most influential linguistic urban legends of all time: the idea that Eskimos have countless words for "snow." In truth, Inuit and Yupik language families (there is no one "Eskimo language") don't have many more terms for snow than other languages do.

Now, after nearly 20 years of dogged debunking, linguist Geoffrey Pullum has posted "The Snow Words Myth: Progress At Last," on Language Log ( a blog where he and a group of academic linguists sound off on the news of the day. A friend recently sent Pullum, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, an article on "Snow Words" from the Holland Herald, the in-flight magazine of KLM airlines, which tried to set the record straight: "The idea that Inuit people have many more words for snow than English speakers is a myth," the article said.

Some of the article's grammatical explanations weren't quite right, Pullum said, but "It was a lot closer to being accurate than the familiar nonsense that has been repeated so many times," he wrote on Language Log.

The truth is out there, and it has been since at least 1986, when linguistic anthropologist Laura Martin wrote an article in the journal American Anthropologist called "Eskimo Words for Snow." She argued that anthropologists were throwing around all kinds of figures for the number of words Eskimo supposedly had for snow without any facts to back them up.

Martin traced the Eskimo-vocabulary myth back to 1911, when Franz Boas wrote in his "Handbook of American Indians" that Eskimo languages had four unrelated terms for snow: "aput," meaning "snow on the ground"; "qana," for "falling snow"; "piqsirpoq," for "drifting snow"; and "qimuqsuq," for "snow drift."

Boas' point was simply that languages can have words with similar meanings but different etymologies -- the same way the English words "liquid," "river," "dew" appear unrelated in origin but all mean something like "water."

So far, no big deal. But then came legendary linguist Benjamin Whorf in the mid-20th Century. Whorf's source isn't clear, but he probably had Boaz's book in mind when he wrote in 1940, "We have the same word for [different kinds of] snow. ... To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be unthinkable." However, Whorf claimed there were at least seven Eskimo words for snow. Linguists and anthropologists seized on this as a primary example of Whorf's important theory that the way we think and look at the world around us is influenced in part by the words our native language gives us. They taught that Eskimos see the world differently than the rest of the non-arctic world does -- you can tell by all those terms for snow in their language.

Martin wrote in her 1986 article that the Eskimo example "has transcended its source and become part of academic oral tradition."

Martin found a 1978 play that said the Eskimos had 50 words for snow and a New York Times editorial that said there were 100 such Eskimo words. I've found media references as high as "a zillion."

"It sort of pumped its way up into being a remarkable factoid through a series of popularizations uncritically embellishing each other," Geoffrey Pullum writes by e-mail.

Pullum was already furious about Eskimo misinformation in 1989, when he explained Martin's research in his column in the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. In 1991, the University of Chicago Press included the article in a collection of Pullum's essays published as "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language" (University of Chicago Press, 246 pages, paperback, $27).

"The truth," Pullum wrote in "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," "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."

The number of root words for "snow" in Inuit and Yupik languages is about four or five, Pullum says -- no more than English (which has "snow," "sleet," "slush," "powder," and "blizzard," to name a few).

What's more, trying to count the exact number of words for any term in those languages is pointless, because Inuit and Yupik are "polysynthetic," meaning they can take a small number of roots and, with several endings, build countless words on any subject.

"Eskimoan languages are really extraordinary in their productive word-building capability, for any root you might pick," wrote Pullum at Language Log. "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."

Things are looking brighter to Pullum after seeing the Holland Herald article earlier this month that helped set the record straight. But he's still cautious about the long-term prospects of debunking the Eskimo vocabulary myth.

"To a modest extent, things have improved a bit," Pullum wrote me by e-mail. But he added, "I think there is a very rational reason for pessimism, and it is this. Once a myth or legend establishes a useful role for itself, it starts to spread faster than scientists can write and publish corrections or criticisms."

Pullum concluded: "I imagine it will spread forever -- the number of people who know it is false (though that number is growing) will never outstrip the number of people who believe it is true."


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