[lit-ideas] Re: "Snow Is White": Tarski's Heritage Revisited
- From: adriano paolo shaul gershom palma <palmaadriano@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2013 19:05:17 +0200
this laughable claim has been debunked, and not once..
http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:53 PM, <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Pullum in:
>
> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419
>
> as per below.
>
> Regarding philosophical pets like
>
> Tarski,
>
> "Snow is white" and "Grass is green".
>
> alla Boas's alleged refutation, rephrased:
>
> "Eskimos have DOZENS, or even HUNDREDS, of words for [what Tarski calls
> 'snow'].
>
> So we may need a redefinition.
>
> Grice made a similar comment with 'grass' (as in "Grass is Green"). As he
> notes, this is not true for Dalton and his followers (the Daltonics), and
> disallows the rigid designation of 'grass':
>
> "The meaning specifications of 'grass' are various -- lawn-material,
> marijuana, etc. -- and some may even go and refute Tarski's claim too" --
> e.g
> Grass (including Marijuana, or Lawn Material) in winter -- and so on."
>
> Cheers,
>
> Speranza
>
> ---
>
> "It was never in doubt that there were several distinct Eskimoan lexemes
> denoting snow phenomena: Boas had given four (Robson also cites just four,
> though they are different ones), and there are certainly some others. But
> one has to be rather careful if counting distinct snow terms is the game.
> What
> is a snow term? Some Eskimoan dialects use a derived word (kavisik)
> meaning "snow with a herring-scale pattern on it caused by re-freezing of
> rain
> pockmarks on fallen snow," but the root (not found in the
> Fortescue/Jacobson/Kaplan Comparative Eskimo Dictionary) appears to mean
> "herring." So we need
> criteria for deciding whether that would be counted as a snow word or a
> herring word — not an insignificant matter, especially with a language
> that
> has such productive word formation that you can construct arbitrarily many
> derived words for snow or herring or coffee or anything else. Similar
> cautions hold for many other items. Illuksaq in Greenlandic has been
> cited as a
> word meaning "snow suitable for building an igloo", but in fact illu-
> means
> "house" and -ksaq means "stuff for the construction of", so illuksaq means
> "house-building material". It is not a snow word at all. In a similar way,
> I have seen a word for soft snow cited, but it appeared to be based on the
> root meaning "soft", and a word for early autumnal snow apparently based
> on
> the root for "fall", and so on. I'm just not sure how many of these should
> count as snow terms."
>
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--
palma, KZN
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palma
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