Re: Another Thing From Straight Dope

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000 10:27:24 -0700 Sylvia Sotomayor
<sylvia1@...> writes:
> Bah.
> The linguist Geoffrey Pullum in his book The Great Eskimo Vocabulary
> Hoax talks
> about how the whole question got started and then mentions:
> <quote>
>         When you pose a question as ill-defined as "How many Eskimo
> words for
> snow are there?" Woodbury observes, you run into major problems not
> just
> determining the answer to the apparently empirical "How many" part
> but with the
> other parts: how to interpret the terms "Eskimo", "words", and "for
> snow". All of them are problematic.
> </quote>
> Sylvia Sotomayor
> sylvia1@ix.netcom.com
> http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/
> from Caldera 2.4 Linux
-

Well, the only reason i mentioned the article is because people have
mentioned the "Eskimo Snow Question" more than a few times here, whether
talking about issues of vocabulary, polysynthesis, etc. and i thought
that the attempted Eskimo sentence at the end was funny, and have decided
to use it as a sig. :-)


-Stephen (Steg)
 "kaniktshaq moritlkatsio atsuniartoq."