Yes it was.
Comment on Law
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 2 days agoWasn’t the “inuits have dozens of words for snow” thing kinda disproven? Afaik they only have like 5 or something, the reason people were saying there were so many is because Inuktitut, Greenlandic, etc are polysynthetic languages, meaning you can pack a LOT of information into one word (it’s possible to make complex one-word sentences for example). This does mean that there are a lot of words based off the root for snow, which is where people got the idea
Pudutr0n@feddit.cl 2 days ago
Hoimo@ani.social 19 hours ago
Kinda disproven, but it’s also a question of what a word even is. Most of those snow words might not make it into a dictionary, but they will get their separate entries in a glossary for a book on snow, because the general sense of the word can be extracted from the parts, but words take on more precise meaning when they’re used more often.
However, we shouldn’t single out Inuits and snow, because the general principle is “words are created and forgotten according to need”. Carpenters have a lot of words for wood. Barely anyone still knows a lot of words for stone tools.
And sure, people who spend a lot of their life in snow will have a lot of words to describe their experiences with snow. But every human language can be used to describe any experience, even if you need to combine some words in new ways to do it. So when we say “Inuit have this many words”, we ignore that people don’t really communicate in single words, but saying “Inuit have this many sentences” makes it immediately obvious that it’s a silly thing to say: all languages have infinite sentences.