| [ SNU ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): guest (123) <socks2.watson.ib> 날 짜 (Date): 2001년 6월 20일 수요일 오후 01시 53분 19초 제 목(Title): The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax 휴우, 이제야 다 읽었습니다. 제가 좀 더 부지런했어야 하는데, 저 대신에 스타일을 구겨주신 hshim님께 심심한 감사와 사죄를 드립니다. (아, 그리고, 위에서 혹시 보면 톡 좀 걸어달라고 부탁하셨는데, 제가 키즈의 톡에 익숙치 않아서요, 혹시 개인적으로 하실 말씀이 있으시면 kimy@cs.unc.edu를 이용해 주시면 감사하겠습니다. 뭐 하실 말씀이 없으시면 그냥 말구요.) 이 내용은 sci.lang newsgroup FAQ에서 발췌합니다. http://www.zompist.com/lang16.html ----- "The Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow." This pseudo-factoid has been circulating for years like an e-mail chain letter. People cite it not because they know anything about Eskimo, but because they heard or read it somewhere. The anthropologist Laura Martin has traced the development of this myth (including the steady growth in the number of words claimed-- in the earliest citations it's just four or seven words). Geoffrey Pullum summarizes her report in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991). Still, how many words are there? It depends on what you mean by words. The Eskimo (Inuit and Yup'ik) languages are agglutinative and polysynthetic-- which means that hundreds of words can be formed from any root in the language, not just words meaning 'snow'. Maybe we should leave all those suffixes out of the picture, and just consider roots and derived words. You'll certainly find hundreds of snow words... but the same is true of English. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 125 compounds of the word 'snow' alone. Probably the fairest comparison is to look at roots. The Yup'ik language in particular has about two dozen roots describing snow or things related to snow. But then English has quite a few itself: snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, flurry, avalanche, powder, drift, firn, poudre, etc. Some of these have non-snow-related meanings; but then so do some of the Yup'ik words. |