03 January 2013 by David Robson
A
century-long wrangle may finally have been resolved
FRANZ
BOAS didn't mean to spark a century-long argument. Travelling through the icy
wastes of Baffin Island in northern Canada during the 1880s, the anthropologist
simply wanted to study the life of the local Inuit people - joining their
sleigh rides, trading caribou skins and learning their folklore. As he wrote
proudly to his fiancée Marie, "I am now truly like an Eskimo... I scarcely
eat any European foodstuffs any longer but am living entirely on seal
meat." He was particularly intrigued by their language, noting the
elaborate terms used to describe the frozen landscape: aqilokoq for "softly falling
snow" and piegnartoq for "the snow (that is) good
for driving sled", to name just two.
Mentioning
his observations in the introduction to his 1911 book The Handbook of American
Indian Languages,
he sparked off the claim that Eskimos have dozens, or even hundreds, of words
for snow. Although the idea continues to capture public imagination - the
singer Kate Bush called her 2011 album 50 Words for Snow - most linguists considered it an
urban legend, born of sloppy scholarship and journalistic exaggeration. Some
have even gone as far as to name it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. The
latest evidence, however, suggests that Boas was right all along.
Snowballing vocabulary
This
debate has rumbled on partly because of a grammatical peculiarity of the Eskimo
family of languages. Boas studied Inuit, one of the two main branches; the
other is Yupik. Each have spawned many dialects, but uniting the family is a
feature known as polysynthesis, which allows speakers to encode a huge amount
of information in one word by plugging various suffixes onto a
"base". For example, a single term might encompass a whole sentence
in English: in Siberian Yupik, the base angyagh (boat) becomes angyaghllangyugtuqlu to mean "what's more, he
wants a bigger boat". This makes compiling dictionaries particularly
difficult; do two terms that use the same base but a different ending really
represent two common idioms within a language, or is the difference simply a
speaker's descriptive flourish? Both are possible, and vocabulary lists could
quickly snowball if an outsider were to confuse the two - a criticism often
levelled at Boas and his disciples.
Yet
Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in
Washington DC believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing
meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and
others have now charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and
conclude that there are indeed many more words for snow than in English (SIKU:
Knowing Our Ice, 2010). Central Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, while the Inuit
dialect spoken in Nunavik, Quebec, has at least 53, including matsaaruti, wet snow that can be used to ice
a sleigh's runners, and pukak, for the crystalline powder snow
that looks like salt. For many of these dialects, the vocabulary associated
with sea ice is even richer. Krupnik has
documented about 70 terms in the Inupiaq dialect of Wales, Alaska, which mark such
distinctions as: utuqaq, ice that lasts year after year; siguliaksraq, the patchwork layer of crystals
that forms as the sea begins to freeze; and auniq, "rotten" ice that is filled with holes like
Swiss cheese.
It
is not just the Eskimo languages that have such colourful terms to describe
their frosty surroundings; the Sami people who live in the northern tips of
Scandinavia and Russia, use at least 180 words related to snow and ice,
according to Ole Henrik Magga, a linguist at the Sami University College in
Kautokeino, Norway (International Social Science Journal, vol 58, p 25).
Crucially, unlike Inuit dialects, Sami ones are not polysynthetic, making it
easier to distinguish words. Incidentally, the Sami also have as many as 1000
words for reindeer. These refer to everything from the reindeer's fitness (leamši means a short, fat female
reindeer) and personality (njirru is an unmanageable female), to the shape of their antlers (snarri is a reindeer whose antlers are
short and branchy). There is even a Sami word to describe a bull with a single,
very large testicle: busat.
In
some ways, this kind of linguistic exuberance should come as no surprise - languages always
evolve to suit the ideas and needs that are most crucial to the
lives of their speakers. "These people need to know whether ice is fit to
walk on or whether you will sink through it," says linguist Willem de
Reuse at the University of North Texas in Denton. "It's a matter of life
or death."
"All
languages find a way to say what they need to say," says Matthew Sturm, a
geophysicist with the US Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska. For Sturm, it is
the expertise these words contain that is of most interest, rather than the
squabble about the number of terms. "Who the hell cares about that! These
are real words that mean real things," he says. He is particularly
admiring of Inuit knowledge of the processes that lead to different snow and
ice formations, mentioning one elder who "knew as much about snow as I
knew after 30 years as a scientist". In Sturm's opinion, documenting this
knowledge is far more important than finding out exactly how many categories
for snow there are.
Others
also recognise the urgency of this work. As many indigenous people turn away
from their traditional lifestyle, the expertise encapsulated in their
vocabulary is fading. That is why researchers such as Krupnik are trying to
compile and present their dictionaries to the local communities, as lasting
records of their heritage. "Boas only recorded a small fragment of the
words available," says Krupnik. In the intervening century much has been
lost. "At his time there would have been many more terms than there are
today."
David
Robson
is a features editor at New Scientist
