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Prompt: Now that you have learned a bit about language, and, in a…
Prompt:
Now that you have learned a bit about language, and, in a brief way, what we and do not know about where this ability stems from, discuss with your classmates what you found to be the most interesting aspect of language. Have you taken our language ability for granted? What were some of the surprising things you learned that might have countered stereotypes you previously held about language and language use? In what ways can language be seen as a human “instinct”?
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Preliminaries
There is no single “Eskimo” language. “Eskimo” is a loose term for the Inuit and Yupik peoples living in the polar regions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia. They speak a variety of languages, the larger ones being Central Alaskan Yup’ik, West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), and Inuktitut. There are multiple dialects of each. Some have more words for snow than others.
A heck of a lot
Today, you see the “Eskimos have so many words for snow” trope everywhere from ads to cartoons to articles about hairstyles. As Laura Martin noted in her 1986 article “Eskimo Words for Snow,” anthropologists and psychologists started using the story in the late 1950’s as a go-to illustration in discussions of the relationship between language, culture, and perception. If Eskimos carved up the world of snow into four or five categories where we had one, was their perception of snow different from ours? From there the idea spread into the popular culture, and it has been going strong ever since. Where the original sources mentioned four or five specific snow words, in the hands of the general public that number turned into 25, 50, 100, 400 – it didn’t really matter. The story did not exist to give information about Eskimo languages, but to say, “hey, other people sure do look at the world differently!”
And this was problematic. The idea of using language to show that other people look at the world differently had a nasty history. Early ethnographers used linguistic evidence to impugn the character or cognitive abilities other peoples. An 1827 book mentions that in the language of Lapland “there are five words for snow, seven or eight for a mountain, but honesty, virtue and conscience must be expressed by a periphrasis.” The academics who picked up the snow words tale in the 1950s didn’t take such a simplistic view of the relationship between language and culture. But to say that having a lot words for something means you find it important or perceive it more readily, gives some people the wrong idea that that not having a lot of words for something means you can’t perceive it and don’t find it important.
