10 Well Known Facts You Thought Were True (That Actually Aren't)
6. Eskimos Have Dozens Of Words For Snow
An example of an urban legend thats spiraled out of control, its been believed for well over a century that the indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle are so surrounded by snow that their language has developed around a hundred different words for it. In fact, the two main families of Eskimo languages follow whats called a polysynthetic model: for the layman, this basically means that they combine words, or parts of words, into long structures that have very specific meanings, new suffixes added onto the end. Imagine a short sentence with all the spaces and punctuation removed, and youve got a good idea as to what that looks and sounds like. Given the number of derivations possible with a language like this, its hardly surprising that people got the wrong end of the stick and assumed that these were all a hundred or so separate words for similar things. Its not the case, though as we understand language, these are complicated and complete phrases, not individual words. Comparing our own clause-based sentence structure with the grammatical structure of Inuit or Yupik is like comparing a busy motorway with a runaway train.
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An example of an urban legend thats spiraled out of control, its been believed for well over a century that the indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle are so surrounded by snow that their language has developed around a hundred different words for it. In fact, the two main families of Eskimo languages follow whats called a polysynthetic model: for the layman, this basically means that they combine words, or parts of words, into long structures that have very specific meanings, new suffixes added onto the end. Imagine a short sentence with all the spaces and punctuation removed, and youve got a good idea as to what that looks and sounds like. Given the number of derivations possible with a language like this, its hardly surprising that people got the wrong end of the stick and assumed that these were all a hundred or so separate words for similar things. Its not the case, though as we understand language, these are complicated and complete phrases, not individual words. Comparing our own clause-based sentence structure with the grammatical structure of Inuit or Yupik is like comparing a busy motorway with a runaway train.