Sorry about the messy way in which this excerpt appeared in my previous note...here it is again...
Ursula Mike Geary wrote:
But, of course, we don't hold a candle to the Eskimos when it comes to snow.
"The first citation dealing with multiple Eskimo words for snow is found in the introduction to The Handbook of North American Indians, the 1911 work of linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas mentions that Eskimos have four separate words for snow: aput ("snow on the ground"), gana ("falling snow"), piqsirpoq ("drifting snow"), and qimuqsuq ("snowdrift"), where English has only one. It is, of course, inaccurate to say that speakers of the English language have only one word for snow. Boas' intent was to connect differences in culture with differences in language.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativism holds that the language we speak both affects and reflects our view of the world. In a popular 1940 article on the subject, Whorf referred to Eskimo languages having seven distinct words for snow. Later writers inflated the figure. By 1978, the number quoted had reached 50. On February 9, 1984 The New York Times gave the number as one hundred in an editorial.
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