Linguistics 110 The great Eskimo Hoax notes Pinker 02 04 2014 she tried to demolish the constantly changing myth of Eskimo snow terminology peculiar group we are prepared to believe almost anything about duch an unfamiliar and Roger Brown s Words and Things attributing the example to Whorf provides an early example of careless popularization and perversion of the issue His numbers disagree with Boas and Whorf He says there are three eskimo words for snow In Carol Eastman s Aspects of Language and Culture the familiar assertion that eskimo languages have many words for snow is found only 6 lines away from a direct quote of Brown s reference to 3 words for snow Pullum mentioned Martins work in a public lecture of his in Santa Cruz County He drove home the point about scholarly irresponsibility to an attentive crowd and thoughhttt he put atleast a temporary halt to careless talk about eskimo morpheme stock within Santacruzcounty but he was wrong within the following 3 months students had been saying their teachers were telling them about the eskimos highly ramified snow vocabulary Pullum says even if there wereee a large number of roots for diff snow types in some arctic language it would not objectively be intellectually interesting it would be a most mundane and unremarkable fact Pullum actually eskimos aren t really that likely to be interested in snow snow must be a kind of constantly assumed background like sand on the beach and even beach bums only have 1 word for sand but there you are the more u think about the eskimo vocab hoax the more stupid it gets The final words of LAURA MARTIN S paper are about her hope that we can come to see the eskimo snow story as a cautionary tale reminding us of the intellectual protection to be found in the careful use of sources the clear presentation of evidence and above all the constant evaluation of our assumptions Pullum says amen to that Also says the prevalence of the great eskimo snow hoax is testimony to falling standards in academia but also to a wider tendency toward fundamentally anti intellectual gee whiz modes of discourse and increasing ignorance of scientific thought Pullum truly believes there aren t many words for snow His evidence C W Schultz Lorentzen s Dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo Language Gives just two possibly relevant roots o qanik snow in the air o aput snow on the ground no other words can be cited Pullum and Actual vocab of eskimos and the range of snow terms they use Pullum contacted an Eskimologist Anthony Woodbury of the Univ of Texas at Austin Woodbury said the crucial issues about many relevant forms he feels needs to be resolved by research that has not yet been done Pullum says he takes responsibility for the somewhat embellished sketch of the position he takes Woodbury put together a list of bases in the Central Alaskan Yupik lanfuage Woodbury is prepared to endorse the claim that the Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo language has about a dozen words forreferring to snow and to related natural phenomena events or behavior Pullum conclusion the chapter isn t about eskimo lexicography at all It is actually about intellectual sloth Among all people making published contributions to this hoax eskimo vocab no one had acquired any evidence about how long the purported list of snow terms really was or what words were on it or what criteria were used in deciding what to put on the list The tragedy is not that so many people got the facts wrong The tragedy is that in the mentally lazy and anti intellectual world we live in today hardly anyone cares enough to think about trying to determine what the facts are 02 04 2014 02 04 2014