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Pullum on Eskimo Snow Terms
Stevan Harnad (harnad@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK)
Sun, 28 May 1995 12:58:25 +0100
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.
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Stevan Harnad
Professor of Psychology
Director, Cognitive Sciences Centre
Department of Psychology
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk harnad@princeton.edu
phone: +44 1703 592582
fax: +44 1703 594597
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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
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