Polysyndeton

[tahnan]

Here's a followup of my own to yesterday's post about Sy Safransky's notebook, but it's not really on the same subject. Rather, it's about linguistics and rhetoric, and happens to use Safransky's claim about Inuit snow words as its basis. (Do note that there have been some very good comments in yesterday's post, including one from Q. Pheevr that—like most of what he writes—makes me suspect I'd be better off just letting him do all the talking, and one from Tablesaw suggesting that at least the core of Safransky's desire to have better terminology to talk about depression is a good idea.)

So. A blogless linguist (and former professor of mine) emailed me to suggest that what Safransky said about Inuit words for snow is, surprisingly, literally true. As a reminder, Safransky said the Inuit have different words for snow on the ground and snow in the air and snow that drifts, and indeed, Pullum concludes his article on the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by encouraging his readers not to stand silent when confronted with the snow myth:

Don't be a coward like me. Stand up and tell the speaker this: C. W. Schultz-Lorentzen's Dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo Language (1927) gives just two possibly relevant roots: qanik, meaning 'snow in the air' or 'snowflake', and aput, meaning 'snow on the ground'. Then add that you would be interested to know if the speaker can cite any more.

Safransky's statement that the Inuit have different words for snow on the ground and snow in the air is therefore definitely true, and if indeed they have a word for 'snow that drifts', the clause quoted above is true in its entirety.

I was stunned. Was I having a knee-jerk reaction? Was I calling out Safransky as a liar when in fact he was being truthful?

Ultimately, no. I think that I'd be wrong to say that Safransky was lying about Inuit words for snow (and fortunately I never actually said he was lying), but I think I can still safely say that he was misleading. I'm borrowing the terms from Jennifer Saul, who uses them in a nigh-technical sense but one intended to be intuitive (the latter fact being what makes her a philosopher and not a linguist, I suspect). Lying is saying something that's outright false; misleading is saying something that's true, but inviting your audience to draw an incorrect conclusion. If you ask me whether my friend Greta is an upstanding citizen and I tell you "Well, she got married and had a kid", and you later learn that she had the kid and then got married, which goes against your idea of upstanding citizenship, I could say "Hey, I just said both things were true! It's not my fault that you went and concluded they happened in that order!" That's "misleading"—I didn't lie, what I said was true, and yet I expected you to draw a false conclusion from what I said and how I said it.

I think that's what Safransky is doing here. For one thing, the "Inuits have 50 words for snow" meme is so widespread and so well-known that he could have written:

And think about the Inuit words for snow; maybe we could have different words for tears....

That doesn't make any assertion at all about what words the Inuit actually have for snow, but it's nevertheless encouraging the reader to think about the "fact" that they have dozens. So any allusion at all to Inuit and snow words is going to be misleading in this way. For another, consider his polysyndeton (mmmm, large words), which is the rhetorical device of using a series of conjunctions in a list instead of commas. As the linguist and commentator Geoffrey Nunberg writes,

it isn't as if polysyndeton has an inherently political meaning, or any inherent meaning at all. The device has been used by everyone from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll to Bob Dylan to very different purposes. But the pattern has a particular cadence in American writing, where it signals plenitude and immediacy...

I think in this case Safransky is very much using the device to signal plenitude here. When he mentions the Inuit words for "snow on the ground and snow in the air and snow that drifts", I think he's inviting the reader to draw the inference "...and so on and so on". If I come back from the National Puzzlers' League convention and tell you how far some people travel for it, I might tell you "There were people from Los Angeles, Boston, Austin, and Vancouver", and that's true, but I don't think it sounds like I'm saying anything more than "there were definitely people from those four places". But if I tell you "There were people from Los Angeles and Boston and Austin and Vancouver", I think it's because I'm trying to give you the impression that these are examples from a long list of similar items.

(Quick note: as Nunberg says, polysyndeton doesn't have a (semantic) meaning in and of itself. If I tell you "I have friends in Europe and Asia and Australia and North America and South America and Africa", I'm not trying to suggest that there are many, many other continents on which I have friends; I am probably trying to suggest something about how expansive that list is, even though it doesn't continue. The "and so on" implication is necessarily context-specific. But I think it's there in the context of Safransky's sentence.)

All of which is to say that Safransky may have not made a false claim, but he nevertheless is communicating that the Inuit have many words for snow.

Comments

[jadelennox]

I also think that the concern colorwheel and I were sharing about exoticism stands, whether or not his claim is literally true. Making claims about those Inuit with their words for snow, whether that number of words is three or many (cue xkcd-prompted linguist rant here), and how that teach something about how we should use words for tears, still distinguishes between THEM, those people who need words for snow, and US, the people who need words for tears.

If I said: "think about Muslim women, with their many varieties of headscarves. Similarly, we should be wearing many kinds of hats," I would be making a series of true statements. There certainly are a reasonable number of varieties of headscarves worn by Muslimahs. Also, I do think that people should wear many kinds of hats. I like hats! But nevertheless, the conjunction of those sentences differentiates between THEM and US (is it inconceivable that there are Muslims reading my journal? (actually I I think there are several); is it inconceivable that any Inuit read Sy Safransky?). The snow comparison has some additional connotation that the headscarf/hat connotation doesn't, about a romantic truth in primitivism.



(Note that like you, I am talking about the original quotation, not about anything DoW said.)

[tahnan]

No doubt. By grounding his rhetoric in the myth, he's

(a) Repeating something false;
(b) Exoticizing ("othering?") the Inuit;
(c) Invoking the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis;
(d) probably other things.

I wanted to focus here on the problem in (a). You're absolutely right that (b) still exists, regardless of (a). And neither the professor who mailed me nor I myself are at all fond of (c), but that, too, is an independent issue; had Safransky merely written "And maybe we could have different words for tears...", with no Eskimo allusions at all, I would still be thoroughly unimpressed by the idea.

To quote Pullum again (at this rate, by next month I'll have reproduced his entire essay, one paragraph at a time and out of order):

Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng's Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos... snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes..." (p. 137). Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers ... fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes.. ." Utterly bonrng, if even true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the ice-packs could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.

In a sense, the irony is that what Safransky ultimately wants is exactly this: that tears be so important to us that we should need to distinguish different kinds of tears, just as printers need to distinguish different kinds of font and interior decorators need to distinguish different kinds of red. But it's a point that can—should—be made without appealing to the Strange and Exotic Other.

(To whom, as Pullum points out, snow is probably so commonplace a part of the background that they're probably not remotely interested in it. In a sense, Safransky is saying, "Snow is so omnipresent, such a constant feature of life, for the Inuit; wouldn't it be nice if tears were the same way for us?" But that's yet another matter.)

[jofish22.livejournal.com]

Ignoring any political or social claim to moral legitimacy here - which I'm willing to posit as a possible move - it's interesting that Japanese has a nice way to distinguish between closed and open lists, through using either "to" or "ya" to mean "and". Thus Los Angeles ya Boston ya Austin ya Vancouver means all of those and then some I didn't mention, whereas Los Angeles to Boston to Austin to Vancouver means those four and only those four.

What is the matter, my lord?

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

You are far too generous to me in that parenthesis, especially when you go so far as to disparage your own elegant and insightful writing.

For what it's worth, Safransky seems to have gotten the snow-words trope as right as it's possible to get it. A 1986 article by Laura Martin in American Anthropologist traces the whole thing back to Franz Boas:

Boas presents a brief citation of four lexically unrelated words for snow in Eskimo: aput 'snow on the ground', qana 'falling snow', piqsirpoq 'drifting snow', and qimuqsuq 'a snow drift'.

So, yeah, "snow on the ground and snow in the air and snow that drifts," and one more. At the very least, I think we have to give Safransky credit for being much more careful with the facts than the typical carrier of this meme.

But the charge of exoticism stands, as you noted. And I think I've finally managed to put my finger on what else it is about the snow-words trope that bugs me as a linguist: it's the fetishization of words. (Geoff Nunberg quotes an apt line from The History Boys here: "What I didn't want was to turn out boys who would talk in their middle age of a deep love of language and their love of words. 'Words,' said in that reverential way that is somehow… Welsh." Well, apt right up until that flash of anti-Cambrian racism at the end, that is.)

In admiring the Inuktitut snow words, Safransky seems, just like the other perpetuators of that meme, to be placing a special importance on vocabulary at the expense of all the other expressive resources of language. Who cares if it takes you one word or four to express the concept of 'snow on the ground'? We constantly need to express things that we have no single words for; that's why we've got infinitely productive syntax! And the ability to pragmatically decode metaphors we've never heard before! Of course, I can appreciate the joy of finding exactly the right word to express a particularly tricky concept, but there's also a great deal of joy to be found in constructing exactly the right phrase, especially when it's a phrase that's never been put together quite that way by anyone else.

Where Safransky seems truly ignorant of the way language works is not in the list of Inuktitut words, but in the proposals for English words. A word for "tears we never cried but should have"? Languages don't generally pack that much counterfactuality into a single noun. "Tears we'll forget by tomorrow"? How many such words do we need? Should we have a separate one for tears we'll remember tomorrow, but forget next week? That's a great deal to make one word mean, as Alice said. And, getting back to the point I made last time, if you really want something to pack a poetic punch, you're much better off making it up fresh; a single word is likely to have its force depleted by time and use.

Finally, I think Safransky overlooked the degree to which the English vocabulary already does allow us to distinguish some different kinds of tears, although the wealth here turns out to be in the verbs rather than in the nouns. (Which makes sense; after all, the tears themselves are really no different.) Consider the meanings of the following sentences, for example:

1. Jesus wept.
2. Jesus sobbed.
3. Jesus cried.
4. Jesus bawled.
5. Jesus blubbered.

Giving (5) as a translation of John 11:35 would, I think, amount to heresy in some people's books.