A few weeks ago, someone who is not related to linguistics asked my opinion on the idea that some languages lend themselves to express certain things better than others and mentioned the well-known cliché about the Eskimo and their 50/100/150 words for snow. After explaining without getting into much detail that this is actually a myth (this was a conversation on WhatsApp, so not a great medium for communicating linguistic concepts), I wanted to learn more about it. Was Pullum’s essay on the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax the last word on the subject? Apparently not.

One way to see it, is that the question lacks an important common ground for understanding, which is: what is a word? Knowing that words may be formed by more than one single morpheme, and that some languages really like their polymorphemic words (polysynthetic languages is the right term for this), you eventually realize that our concept of word is more language-specific than you think. Meanwhile, it seems that there has been even more research done saying that Boaz was right, which is mildly amusing since it looks like the crux of the controversy went somewhat over their heads.

At this point, I still want to know how many root morphemes they (whatever flavor of Eskimo–Aleut) have for snow. It seems like it’s… two or three. Either way, it’s less important if we take into account that some of these words do not necessarily refer to snow as “a type of snow that has such-and-such properties”, but as a means for building something and whatnot (e.g. “building material for houses”). I am too lazy to start looking at Eskimo-Aleut grammars, though the phonology looks pretty cool with those velars and uvulars. For the time being, I might give non-linguist Kate Bush’s take on the issue a go.