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Sunday, November 21, 2004, 16:25

Urban Legends: Do Eskimos really have 100 words for snow?

i have a phoenix - Reviews by a librarian

Everyone thinks the Eskimos have 100-plus words for snow. Everyone is wrong. They don't. In the book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Pinker writes:

"Where did the myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually studied the Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages spoken from Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura Martin has documented how the story grew like an urban legend, exaggerated with each retelling."

Later, Pinker quotes linguist Geoffrey Pullum: "Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior designers have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for fonts..., naturally enough." >> continue

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