The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.

EVEN THOUGH I fall outside its usual academic target-audience, I said yes to Lingua Franca's 1990 subscription offer, because it got to me personally. The offer featured an article, "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," purporting to debunk a myth regarding the number of words Eskimos, have for snow. It just so happened that I, -- many years ago, of course, you understand -- well, that I passed along such a "myth," if indeed it was, to other unsuspecting people.

The Mathsemantic Monitor fells that good semantic practice requires him to search out and destroy his own unsound semantic habits, and when safe, even to help others in the same way.

Accordingly, I felt obliged to say yes. My subscription, however, began with a later issue. The one that had motivated me was sold out. I seemed to have missed fate's hook.

Then a 1992 University of Chicago Press catalog listed a book ($14.95, postage paid, paperback) by Geoffrey K. Pullum titled, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the study of Language. This time I connected.

Professor Pullum's book consists of twenty-four short and seriously irreverent articles published originally as "Topic ...Comment" columns in Natural Language and Linguisic Theory, a journal whose existence, I confess, had previously escaped my notice. The title article was in chapter 19. Not wanting to rush to my reward without knowing something about my nemesis, I began at the "Foreword." Its author, James D. McCawley, quickly made clear that I'd purchased a collection of in-stories I might not understand:

Each Pullum column [said McCawley] was an exquisitely crafted piece of criticism, satire, fantasy, and/or reporting, dealing entertainingly and provocatively with important issues relating to the ways in which we linguists practice our profession or to the ways in which the world beyond our journals, classrooms, and conferences impinges on linguistics and its practitioners.

Like Freemasonry, the roles of insider and outsider admit of degrees. Pullum must rank as a 33rd-degree linguistics insider. I'm not any kind of linguistics professional (or professional anything else except aviation consultant). My dabblings in linguistics allowed me to recognize only about one is six of the people and publications Pullum mentioned. But that was enough to keep me going.

And as I read on, averageing less than one short chapter per sitting, my appreciation grew slowly and irregularly. The first seven chapters, on "Fashions and Tendencies" in linguistics, were for me the hardest. Chapter six, for example, an interview of Noam Chomsky by Science Officer Spock on the Generative Enterprise, must be a scream for scholars in the linguistics space quadrant. I managed a polite but mostly uncomprehending smile.

The next seven chapters, on "Publication and Damnation," began to tickle. By the time I started the next six chapters, on "Unscientific Behavior," I was ready to laugh. Chapter fifteen, "The Revenge of the Methodological Moaners", broke me up. As the author warns, in this piece he "rails against the tendency of linguists to write about the philosophy of science as applied to their subject instead of writing about what languages are like, which is what linguists are supposed to be good at." You could find similar tendencies in almost any social science.

The last chapter in the "unscientific-behavior" section reminded me of the care with which Allen Walker Read tracked down the origin of "OK." In this chapter Pullum exposes and destroys "the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax."

Because I should, and because I believe you'll find it interesting, let me pass along Pullum's assignment of credit. "What I do here," he says, "is very little more than an extended review and elaboration on Laura Martin's wonderful American Anthropologist report of 1986 [based in turn on a speech she gave in 1982]. 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."

Depending on your point of view, you may attribute Martin's reception to gender discrimination, Pullum's success (which I see as also Martin's success, just as Hayakawa's is Korzybski's) to the power of his wit, or the whole progression to nothing more than time ripening.

In condensed form, here's Pullam's argument:

1. Never does a month...go by without yet another publication of the familiar claim about the wondrous richness of the Eskimo conceptual scheme...for different grades and types of snow, a...quintessential demonstration of how primitive minds categorize the world so differently from us.

2. The fact is that the myth of the multiple words for snow is based on almost nothing at all. It is a kind of accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself.

3. The original source is Franz Boas [who said in 1911 only that Eskimo uses four apparently distinct roots for snow on the ground, falling snow, drifting snow, and a snow drift]. Boas' point is simply that English expresses these notions by phrases involving the root snow, but things could have been otherwise, just as the words for lake, river, etc., could have been formed...on the root water.

4. What happened [next] was that Benjamin Lee Whorf... picked up Boas' example and used it, vaguely, in his 1940 amateur linguistics article "Science and Linguistics" [1], which was published in MIT's promotional magazine, Technology Review (Whorf was an alumnus)....

We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, winddriven flying snow -- whether the situtation would be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.

Whorf's inflated example so appealed to popular and professional imaginations that things got out of hand. Pullum cites works from 1958 through 1988, giving the number of Eskimo words for snow variously as 3, 4, 7, 9, 48, 50, and even 100 (a 1984 New York Times editorial), 200 (a 1984 Cleveland weather forecast), apparently the "offical" record, and 400 (but caught before publication).

Pullum's recounting omits the significant role general secmanticists played in spreading the myth. Whorf's 1940 article was reprinted in 1941 as one of the "readings" in Hayakawa's Language in Action. That's where I first saw Whorf's name. How his article got there, whether at the publisher's request or as Hayakawa's afterthought, I don't know. Neither the book's index nor its bibliography lists Whorf. This lack is consistent with Hayakawa's mimeographed and wire-bound classroom version of Language in Action dated September 1, 1940. It has no readings and no mention of Whorf.

In any event, Hayakawa's 1941 book, a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, certainly spread Whorf's Eskimo story to a wide audience.

Many general semanticists liked the way the snow words demonstrated the interactions of language and behavior. You have to realize that most persons in the 1940s regarded language, if they thought about it at all, as just the carrier of thought, whcih was presumed to proceed everywhere along the same lines. That time has passed. Most people today will grant, for example, that sexiest language and behavior profoundly support each other, a lively illustration that language habits and behavior go -- and presumably change -- together. But Whorf's article was useful back then to those who were trying to make that point.

The institute of General Semantics reprinted and distributed the article. Many general semanticists -- including the Mathsemantic Monitor -- repeated the snow-words example. There's enough of what used to be credit, and is now blame, to go around.

Pullum attacks the snow-story with caustic irreverence. He asks, for example, where Whorf, the "Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier," had obtained his "uncanny perception into the hearts and minds of the hardy Arctic denizens" who "were not a prominent feature of Hartford's social scene at the time...." His wit stings.

[Whorf's] claims about English speakers are false;...I recall the stuff in question being called..slush when partly melted, sleet when falling in a half-melted state, and a blizzard when pelting down hard enough to make driving dangerous. Whorf's remark about his own speech community is no more reliable than his glib generalization about what things are "sensuously and operationally different" to the generic Eskimo.

Whorf enthusiasts objected irately.

Pullman responded by lauding Whorf's place in linguistics, in deciphering Mayan, in coining useful terms, and in introducing intriguing new concepts, but without softening his snow-word article, which he described as "designed to infuriate" and "a blow for truth, responsibility, and standards of evidence in linguistics." The Mathsemantic Monitor sympathizes with Pullum's vulnerable position. If you want to promote good work, occasions arise where you have to call shoddy shoddy.

Pullum closes his snow chapter with an appendix titled, "Yes, But How Many Really?" To find out, Pullum called Anthony Woodbury, the best Eskimologist he knew.

When you pose a question as ill-defined as "How many Eskimo words for snow are there?" Woodbury observes, you run into major problems not just with determining the answer to the apparently empirical "How many" part but with the other parts: how to interpret the terms "Eskimo", "words" and "for snow". All of them are problematic.

This hits the mathsemantic Monitor where he lives. What do we mean by "Eskimo"? The languages Eskimo people speak vary. So which vocabulary do we use? What do we mean by "word"? Are "snowflake" and "snowbank" separate words from "snow" in this context? If not, can we count "flake" and "bank" as words for snow when the context is understood? Are "slush," "powder," "sleet," "blizzard," "crust," and "avalanche" words for "snow"? You see where this leads: We don't know enough about what we're talking about to make a count.

Don't just sit there with a tear and egg on your face.

Spread the word.

Undo.

REFERENCE

[1.] Reprinted in Carroll, John B., ed. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.