Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Popula is a new-to-me news site which runs on Civil. Five articles free/month then the paywall goes up. Lots of interesting reading, including Aaron Bady’s linguistic historiography on the chestnut “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow.” Bady points out it is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. Includes a pictorial dictionary of actual Polar people’s words for snow, as well as somewhat salvaging Whorf’s reputation.

White Words

What if, Whorf asks, we take as our starting point what speakers of one language take for granted—as idiomatic—but others do not? What if instead of focusing on the glass-half-full that is the translatability between languages, we start thinking about the glass-half-empty of what is incommensurably different?

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what can we learn about science from languages, and their speakers, whose perception of the universe is organized by different architectures of meaning than our own?

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[we can] learn a lot from speakers of “Eskimo” languages, not only because native peoples might know things about how the world works, but because in the friction between different ways of perceiving, we can become aware of the conceptual and linguistic constraints on how our own knowledge can be deployed. For this reason, he closes with an exhortation to “that humility which accompanies the true scientific spirit, and thus forbid that arrogance of the mind which hinders real scientific curiosity and detachment.”

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Buried in the fact that fifty is wrong is a story about how knowledge is construed through Google’s shallow reach into academic research, a story about how media’s fetish for novelty produces debunking backlashes, a story about how an international word can be offensive in one nation but not another, a story about how textbooks seize facts as examples by draining them of complexity and then propagate that oversimplification, a story about how scholars push back against amateur expertise and defend the citadels of knowledge from relativity, a story about how early twentieth-century ethnography was racist and exoticizing (and also, interestingly, about how it was less so than it can seem from a differently racist and exoticizing retrospective gaze), and a story about languages are not possessed but nurtured and used.