Science Behind the Factoid: Eskimo Words for Snow
You’ve probably heard about the Eskimos’ incredible amount of words for snow. Perhaps you’ve also heard that this is in fact a myth. Linguist Geoff Pullum traced the origins of this myth in the article The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. That article was published in 1989, building on work by the anthropologist Laura Martin first presented in 1982. More than 30 years ago, this myth was already debunked, but this “interesting fact” remains in the public consciousness.
Pullum makes several interesting points in his paper. First and foremost, he cites a dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo language, a language of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, which has only two roots for snow: qaanik, meaning “snow in the air” or “snowflake,” and aput, “snow on the ground.” Secondly, English does not have only one word for snow. There is sleet, hail, slush, blizzard, powder, crust, avalanche, snowflake etc.
Thirdly, the structure of Eskimo languages is such that one can derive practically infinite words for anything. Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, which means that they build most words out of many meaningful units (morphemes), such that a single word may express an entire clause or sentence. English is only mildly synthetic language, meaning it builds words out of a moderate amount of morphemes. For instance, the word foretell consists of the two morphemes fore- and tell. A language with few morphemes per word is called an isolating language. Mandarin Chinese is rather isolating. Compare these two sentences from Mandarin and the Eskimo language Inuktitut:
nî de3ng wo3, wo3 jiu4 ge1n nî qu4 (the numbers indicate tones)
utaqqiguvinga, aullaqatiginiaqpagit
Both sentences mean “If you wait for me, I will go with you.” The difference is that Inuktitut builds single words out of many morphemes to express complex concepts, while Chinese uses separate words where each word contains only one or two morphemes. It’s clear that Inuktitut, with its many inflections, can derive a large number of words from the same root, but this does not reflect any special importance for the word, since the two long words in Inuktitut are built up so that they express the same concept as the eight words in Mandarin.
Pullum further slags the concept of numerous words for snow by pointing out that technical vocabulary regularly makes detailed distinctions that the layman would not think to make. A graphic designer has a large number of words to describe text: what they would describe as 72 pt Helvetica Condensed center-aligned would perhaps be described by a layman as “huge-ass text.” It’s not interesting at all, says Pullum, that people with specialist competence would make very narrow distinctions that people without such specialist knowledge would not. Thus, even if Eskimos did have a hundred words for snow, this would not be particularly interesting.
This point is arguable. Yes, technical language is more precise than layman’s language. But the fact that different languages or specialist groups make narrow distinctions is, in fact, of anthropological, if not linguistic interest. It reminds us that it’s possible to divide up the semantic space—the space of meanings—in different ways than those we’re familiar with. This point may be very familiar to linguists who study diverse languages around the globe, but it is still interesting to those of us who are not linguists and aren’t familiar with more than one or two languages. One example of fuzzy versus precise distinctions lies in kinship terms. Mandarin distinguishes eight types of cousin, for instance “elder male paternal cousin,” but lacks a word that means “any kind of cousin,” like English has.
So the interesting factoid about Eskimos and snow is a myth. But are there societies or languages that do, in fact, have huge amounts of words for concepts that English lumps together into one word? This article gives us another factoid to replace the one about Eskimos and snow. It must be taken with a grain of salt, as the article only makes a vague reference to a dictionary, and does not properly cite a source. Nevertheless, if it is true, it inspires the same kind of awe that the Eskimo snow hoax. The factoid concerns the West African language Fula, spoken by an ethnic group that were traditionally cattle herders. According to the article, Fula has more than eighty words for “cattle,” making such distinctions as:
… guddiri ‘bull without a tail’, wudde ‘cow without a tail’, jaabuye ‘cow with a large navel’, lelwaaye ‘cattle with eyes like a gazelle’, gerlaaye ‘cattle that is like a bush-fowl’, happuye ‘cow in milk after her calf has died’, mbutuye ‘cow whose calf has been killed so that she may be fattened’, and other useful terms. A number of different types of cattle are distinguished by their horns: elliinge ‘cattle with upright horns’, gajje ‘cattle with horns twisted back’ (also called mooro), hippe ‘cattle with horns drooping forward’, hogole ‘cattle with horns almost meeting’, lettooye ‘cattle with one horn up and the other drooping’, wijaaye ‘cattle with horns drooping towards the ears’, tolle ‘cow with one horn’, and wumale ‘cow without horns’.I’m wary of spreading another myth, and I don’t speak Fula, so I can’t vouch for this. But still. Haven’t you ever wanted a word for a cow with a large navel?