This will be shattering news to millions of people who attended college after about 1958, when the theories of the great amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf began to appear in college psychology texts. Whorf held that Eskimos - living in daily contact with snow in its variously slushy, dry, powdery or crusty forms - use different words for substances that English speakers call just “snow.” (Whorf didn’t specify how many words, but he implied there were around seven.) It is not hard to see why this mundane observation should have emerged as one of the handful of facts most liberal-arts majors retained from their educations. Simple to grasp, it had implications so profound that anyone who stayed awake through his introductory-psychology course could feel like another Descartes. For if the Eskimos use many different words for things that English speakers lump into one category, does it not follow that they actually perceive the world differently? That Eskimos do not grasp the unity among all forms of frozen precipitation, while non-Eskimos do not see the differences, at least until they try to lift a shovelful of slush? Like, is that heavy - the idea, not the shovel–or what?
It would be, if only it were true. Martin, along with the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum, author of “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” (236 pages. University of Chicago Press. $42.95, paperback $14.95), has traced the story’s progress from learned exotica to the world of Sunday-supplement Astounding Facts showing how it became more incredible along the way. Most of the references Martin found put the number of Eskimo snow words at 17 to 23, but The New York Times once casually referred to “100.” The misunderstanding seems to have arisen because Eskimos do indeed have more than one word for snow and snow-related phenomena. Anthony Woodbury of the University of Texas at Austin puts the number at around a dozen. But, he adds, the proper comparison to English is not with the single noun “snow,” but a list of at least 10 words, including “blizzard,” “dusting” and “avalanche.” Martin admits that her efforts are unlikely to get the public to drop such a charming myth. But she was disappointed in the reaction of her colleagues when she pointed out the fallacy; most, she says, took the position that true or not, “it’s still a great example.”
Well, so it is. To play Descartes for a minute, does it perhaps provide an example of how language can be used to change how we perceive reality? If a lack of vocabulary can cause us to overlook the differences between kinds of snow, then maybe we could learn to ignore the differences between human races by unlearning the names for them. Just a thought: we are all, after all, much more alike than, say. powder, hardpack and slush.
