Polysynthetic languages and Eskimo snow

Wordsmith.org

This question is particularly aimed at the linguists among us, but don't let that stop anyone else from commenting (as if I could stop y'all)

In another forum the question of the number of words for snow in Eskimo languages has raised its perennial head.

For those of you unfamiliar with the controversy it centers around the question of whether Eskimo languages really do have a significantly larger number of words for snow and ice than do languages of people living in climates less blessed with the substance. This has apparently been a piece of received knowledge for many years until a gentleman name of Geoffrey K. Pullum wrote an essay pooh-poohing the idea.

Mark Halpern, occasional writer for the Vocabula Review (http://www.vocabula.com/VRFEB02Halpern.htm), has written an essay counterpooh-poohing the Pullum thesis and in doing so mentions the fact that Eskimo languages are polysynthetic. (Googling <polysynthetic language> yields a wealth of info on polysynthetic languages; you can pick your level)

In the Vocabula Review Forum (from whence hev, BTW) the point was raised that the great number of words for snow in Eskimo languages was only half of the initial observation; the other half was that Eskimo languages had no word for snow in general. My question is whether the fact that Eskimo languages are polysynthetic assures us that they would have no words for anything in general.

"people living in climates less blessed [E.A] ..."?

Blessing that as it may, this is a very interesting consideration. I cannot answer your question now though I look forward to comments (tsuwm? NicholasW? slithy toves? et al?)I learned a long time ago that languages could be loosely grouped into two (as accountants into three)*: those that are synthetic (Latin, for example) and those that are analytic (English, for example). Are there any polyanalytic languages out there? I bet there are, and they all have to do with software.

~~
*said groups provided if no one comes up with the punchline in say, 24 hours.

there are 3 kinds of accountants - those who can count, and those who cannot!

The Inuktitut for snow in general is aput.

I don't really know what 'polysynthetic' was meant to mean. It's not a term I or (I think) any modern linguist would use. Inuktitut is agglutinative, and synthetic, but the word-formation is not hugely different from that of any other such, like Turkish, as far as I know.

The Urban Legends site discusses this at
http://www.urbanlegends.com/language/eskimo_words_for_snow_derby.html.

Mark Halpern is not a linguist, in fact, some of his earlier articles in TVR are trashings of linguists. One of the sites I got to through Google (http://makeashorterlink.com/?C51E2018) divides polysynthetic languages into agglutinative (http://makeashorterlink.com/?F23E3218) and fusional (http://makeashorterlink.com/?W25E6118).

Well, well Ms. Baronia, when exactly did you meet my hubby

. A skilled accountant with poor math skills. He always says that accountants can't count.

Dunno much about polysynthetic languages. Sounds like you should be wrapping yourself in them when it snows any one of the 49 Inuit variations ...

However, Dr Doolittle can probably do you a line in synthetic polly languages - teaching the parrot to speak Pascal, I suppose! C++ would be beyond most parrots. Too object-orient(at)ed.

The example that SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) site gives for polysynthetic is Inuktitut, and the one example from the language they give is characterized by two things:

(i) A large number of morphemes. This is something any agglutinative language can do if you look for extreme examples, e.g. English modal verbs in 'I wasn't going to have been doing it' might be encoded in an agglutinative language as multiple affixes.

(ii) The verb and its object are part of the same word, e.g. 'hunt seals'. This is called incorporating, and English does this too ('babysitter', 'deer-hunting'), but many North American languages have it in a more pervasive way. And those like Inuktitut or Mohawk that are also agglutinative will therefore produce words that contain most of the meaning of the sentence.

I still don't think 'polysynthetic' describes anything very clear, unless it's used as shorthand for incorporating and agglutinative.

Another old term like this is 'holophrastic', where a single word expresses a sentence. You can do this more easily in such languages, but that doesn't mean they don't have distinct words.