Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
The Vegan Street Blog
December 2016
According to my research, the idea of “Eskimos” having more words for snow than we do is thought to be an exaggeration by some linguists and thought to be correct by others given the unique attributes of polysynthetic languages.
All that said, I think we need as many words for tofu as it is as important in the life of many vegans as snow and ice to polar inhabitants. I have identified these words for tofu.
There is a ongoing controversy surrounding a quote attributed to the novelist Margaret Atwood: “The Eskimos had 52 names for snow because it was important to them; there ought to be as many for love.” The quote is controversial for a couple of reasons, both leading back to the cultural and linguistic nuances of the polar-dwelling, indigenous people commonly referred to in the U.S. as Eskimos. The concept of the “52 words” has its origins in the work of linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas, who wrote about the expansive and expressive language characteristics he observed and learned while living with the Inuit of Baffin Island in Canada in his 1911 book, Handbook of American Indian Languages.
The controversy swirls because first, there is no singular Eskimo language; those referred to as “Eskimos” are actually mainly Inuit and Yupik populations found in the Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia that are not united by a singular language or culture. Second, it is not so much that the languages and dialects have so many delightfully evocative words for snow: it is that the languages are polysynthetic, meaning that they employ root or base words that scores of suffixes can be attached to so one “word” can actually be turned into a complex and descriptive sentence, which could be described as a sentence-word. Atwood’s observation remains the same, though: snow was important to these populations – the ratios of water to powder, how packable it is, how dry – and so the more vivid and descriptive the language was for capturing its nuances and characteristics, the better. (This was even more true for describing ice as their safety depended on understanding the different qualities of it.) According to my research, the idea of “Eskimos” having many more words for snow than we do is thought to be an exaggeration by some linguists and thought to be correct by others given the unique attributes of polysynthetic languages.
All that said, I think we need as many words for tofu as it is as important in the life of many vegans as snow and ice to polar inhabitants. I have identified these words for tofu.
What would you add to the list? What would you call it?
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