Free The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison Page B

effectively means that language determines reality—that it determines what we can think and therefore what we can say.
    The strong form of the thesis has been largely discredited, though a weaker form—the theory of linguistic relativity, which holds that language influences our experience of reality—has been mostly accepted. 6 Another way to formulate this is that language doesn’t tell us what we can say, rather it tells us what we must say. 7 Instead of thinking of language as a kind of blinder that prevents us from seeing or saying certain things, we can think of it as a magnifying glass that focuses our attention, requiring us to pay attention to certain details. So, for a Tuvan speaker, because he must know the direction of the river current in order to say “go,” the language is forcing him to pay attention to river flow and to be aware of it at all times.
    Languages may focus or channel our thoughts in particular ways. A speaker of the Carrier language must know the tactile properties of an object in order to say “give.” What is being given? Is it small and granular? Fluffy? Mushy? Liquid? Each type of material requires a different verb form for “give.” And so speakers must talk about tactile properties of objects. In many small ways, languages focus thought rather than limiting it.
    No better example can be found than the controversial subject of how many words the Eskimo have for “snow.” A Google search for “Eskimo snow words” yields more than 10,000 hits. Deriding this as an example of bad science run amok has become somewhat of a game among linguists. A leading academic in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax stated unequivocally that the Inuit people of Alaska do not have many words for snow, and in fact have only about a dozen basic ones. The debunkers rely on this count to show that Inuit snow words are neither prolific nor special. This stance feeds into a more general agenda of asserting that all languages are equal and equally interesting to science.
    Proponents of this view became so intent on debunking it that they spawned a new term—“snow clones”—to mock all such statements that “The so-and-so people have x number of words for y.” Entire Web pages are devoted to listing mock Eskimo snow words that have imaginary meanings like “snow mixed with husky shit” or “snow burger.” Even Steven Pinker took up the issue in his book The Language Instinct, stating: “Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a coinage of Boston’s WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.” 8
    Sadly, the snow-cloners have missed the point. They have grossly underestimated the number of words by relying on very limited modern accounts and thinking that just because the number was inflated in the past by people who should have known better, the true count must be unimpressively low. As we will see, the number of snow/ice/wind/weather terms in some Arctic languages is impressively vast, rich, and complex. Furthermore, they have missed the forest for the trees, failing to see the importance of how words encode knowledge. Beyond the sheer numbers of words for natural phenomena like snow and ice, these languages demonstrate the complex ways in which words package information efficiently.
    The Yupik people have one of the most amazing survival technologies known to mankind, one that has allowed them to thrive in the world’s harshest environment, the Arctic, for over 6,000