University of Texas at Austin
July 1991
This is a list of lexemes referring to snow and related notions in one Eskimo language, Central Alaskan Yupik (or just Yup'ik Eskimo). It is spoken by about 13,000 people in the coast and river areas of Southwestern Alaska from Norton Sound to Bristol Bay. It is one of five Eskimo languages. (Of these five, probably the best-known is Inuit, spoken in a series of well-differentiated dialects ranging from Northern Alaska, all across the Canadian far north, and up to the coast of Greenland. While the term Inuit is preferred to Eskimo by many in Canada, the term is retained here because (a) it properly refers to any Eskimo group, not only the Inuit; and (b) its use is widespread in Native communities in Alaska.)
This is a list of lexemes rather than of words. Roughly, a lexeme can be thought of as an independent vocabulary item or dictionary entry. It's different from a word since a lexeme can give rise to more than one distinctly inflected word. Thus English has a single lexeme _speak_ which gives rise to inflected forms like _speaks_, _spoke_, and _spoken_. It's especially important to count lexemes rather than words when talking about Eskimo languages. That's because they are inflectionally so complicated that each single noun lexeme may have about 280 distinct inflected forms, while each verb lexeme may have over 1000! Obviously, that would put the number of snow words through the roof very quickly.
The list is organized according to lexeme *meanings*. Perhaps somewhat arbitrarily I have counted fifteen of them, placing within each of them noun and/or verb lexemes having the same basic sense. And perhaps even more arbitrarily, I've grouped these fifteen meanings into four larger sets. But the most arbitrary decision of all is left to the discretion of the reader-the decision of how to count the lexemes themselves. Here are some of the problems you face:
(a) Are all fifteen lexeme meanings really 'snow'-meanings? That is, do words with these meanings really count for you as words for snow?[2]
(b) There are some synonyms present--alternative lexemes with the same meaning, like garbage vs. trash in English. Are you going to count them separately, or together?
(c) If you decided to count synonyms together, will you also count together both of the members of noun-verb pairs having basically the same meaning? (The members are, technically speaking, separate lexemes since partly idiosyncratic morphological changes mark the verbal forms, and must therefore be listed separately in any truly informative dictionary, as indeed Jacobson's dictionary does.)
(d) Following Jacobson, I've specially labelled those lexemes that only occur in a small subpart of the Central Alaskan Yupik-speaking region. Are you going to try to make counts for each separate dialect? If yes, you will wonder if you really have enough information to do so. (You're not alone in this-such information is difficult to compile, whether or not you are a linguist, and also whether or not you are a native speaker of a language.)[3]
APPENDIX: An unordered list of English snow lexemes
FOOTNOTES
1. Published by Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
2. The indeterminacy and difficulty of this question is due to the fact that words don't merely match pre-existing things in the world. Rather, they shape and encapsulate ideas about things--how they are categorized (compare dog vs. canine), how we are interacting with them (compare sheep vs. mutton), how the word functions grammatically (compare the noun cow vs. the adjective bovine), and how we wish to represent our attitudes about them (compare critter vs. varmint). It was in connection with this point that discussion of Eskimo words for snow first arose (in the writings of two major 20th Century anthropological linguists, Franz Boas and Benjamin Lee Whorf). Unfortunately, their point has been pretty much missed by those who insist on counting.
3. Here are the dialect area abbreviations used:
When Geoff Pullum's book, 'The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax,' came out, I started getting quite a number of inquiries from journalists about "words for 'snow' in Eskimo." That motivated me to prepare the appended item. Please feel free to pass it around.
Tony Woodbury