Pullum on Eskimo Snow Terms

The 16th and last talk in the Southampton University Cognitive Science Centre's inaugural year's series will be given by Jeff Pullum. It is the latest development in the hard times on which the beleaguered Whorf/Sapir Hypothesis has fallen in recent years. For more information, see the URLs following the abstract. Not all the news for Whorf is bad... 4:00 pm Wednesday 31 May 1995 Lecture Room 1, Murray Building, Southampton University ESKIMO SNOW VOCABULARY: WHAT ARE THE ACTUAL FACTS? AND WHAT IMPLICATIONS DO THEY HAVE FOR THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CATEGORIZATION? Geoffrey K. Pullum, University of California, Santa Cruz ABSTRACT: An astonishingly large number of both popular and scholarly sources assert that the Eskimos have an interestingly large number of words for snow. Yet the claims about how many are all different. So are the conclusions we are apparently supposed to draw about language and thought. Laura Martin first drew attention to this in a paper on the anthropology of anthropologists [American Anthropologist 88.2 (1986) 418-423]. I subsequently published a tongue-in-cheek essay that mocked linguists for being unaware of her work and generally doing less than nothing to fight the spread of "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" [the eponymous essay in my 1991 book] --- and have found, to my dismay, that it now gets cited as research on Eskimo lexicology. But in truth, although assorted lists of possibly relevant material have appeared on the LINGUIST mail list and the sci.lang newsgroup, no one has yet published a linguistic analysis and assessment of the relevant facts, or attempted to assess the logic of the multitude of morals for our theories of language and thought that have been implicitly attached to the supposed facts. In this work-in-progress talk, based on joint research with Laura Martin, a start is made on this project. The talk is relatively nontechnical, but departs from most previous work by actually looking at lexical material from some of the eight Eskimo languages. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad Professor of Psychology Director, Cognitive Sciences Centre Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk harnad(a)princeton.edu phone: +44 1703 592582 fax: +44 1703 594597 -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals