“Eskimo Words for Snow”: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example

By Laura Martin. 1986

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology, Linguistics

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Science & Psychology

1. Steven A. Sloman
2. Barbara C. Malt
3. Simon Springer
4. L. Maffi

In Linguistics

1. Ishan Misra
2. Steven A. Sloman
3. Barbara C. Malt
4. Simon Springer
5. L. Maffi

Citations in the corpus

• Does Object Recognition Work for Everyone? (2019, background): “For example, Inuit languages have over a dozen words for “snow” to distinguish between different types of snow [31, 39].”
• LINGUISTIC, CULTURAL, AND BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY (2005, background): “From Boas’s famous notes on Eskimo words for snow (Boas 1911; see Martin 1986, Pullum 1989 on the later vast misinterpretations and distortions, both scholarly and popular, of this topic) to Whorf’s related remarks in his popular 1940 article “Science and Linguistics” (Whorf 1940), these early…”
• Universality and language specificity in object naming (2003, background): “is another example of this suggestion ( Martin, 1986; Pullum, 1991).”
• Neoliberalism as discourse: between Foucauldian political economy and Marxian poststructuralism (2012, background): “The idea that Inuit peoples have hundreds of words for the English language equivalent of ‘snow’ is an anthropological myth (Martin, 1986), but it is nonetheless instructive of how ‘the real world’ can be viewed as little more than a semiotic construction, where even something as seemingly…”