Get the latest tech news
Linguists find proof of sweeping language pattern once deemed a 'hoax'
Inuit languages really do have many words for snow, linguists found—and other languages have conceptual specialties, too, potentially revealing what a culture values
A great game of telephone inflated the number until, in 1984, the New York Times published an editorial claiming the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white stuff we lump under a single term. He likened it to the xenomorph from Alien, a creature that “seemed to spring up everywhere once it got loose on the spaceship, and was very difficult to kill.” His acerbic critique rendered the subject taboo for a generation, says Victor Mair, an expert on Chinese language at the University of Pennsylvania. As Murphy puts it, they “offer only snapshots of a language at a particular time, from a particular angle.” Some of the dictionaries used are decades or centuries old, and they may reflect the archaic concerns of colonizers—to translate the Bible or establish a trade route—as much as those of modern-day speakers.
Or read this on Hacker News
