Beginning chapter eight, I see that again Benson makes errors when he ventures from Russia to discuss the New World. He claims that native americans were baffled by the concept of private property, believing all land was holy and belonged to nature. That was a myth made up to justify seizing their land, then later adopted by environmentalists sympathetic to their plight. A few pages later he writes “the local Buryats seemed able to make as many distinctions between one kind of dung an another as Eskimos could with snow”. The Eskimo-words-for-snow meme is also mythical. What is it about native americans that results in this stuff being so widely believed?
August 4, 2009
Entitled to an Opinion 
August 4, 2009 at 8:40 pm
[…] Native Americans and Property Rights (via): Like many property teachers, I sometimes encounter the persistent myth that Native Americans […]
August 5, 2009 at 12:14 am
Do you see guerrillas vs regulars issues in this patch of history?
Have you read Lawrence Keely’s book? He says primative/tribal war is generally a lot like guerrilla war.
If he explores the root of the whole phenomenon, I must have skipped it accidentally in my on-and-off reading. But it seems like the root might be the simple lack of cities and other massively valuable property for the guerrillas to defend. This was certainly the case with the Scythians who simply retreated from the Persians across the steppe according to Herodotus, bringing their families and herds.
With the adversary lacking cities, if he refuses pitched battle there is nothing to attack/arrest except the civvies, as the Brits did against the Boers, interning the civvies (though they may or may not have meant to actually harm them; I don’t know anything about that).
If you’ve piled up a lot of silver and made iron forges and have just finished building some sort of mind-blowing cathedral that will, centuries hence, put your disgusting “post-modern” progeny to utter shame, it’s kind of hard to go all Che Guevara in the mountains while your enemies wreck and appropriate all that stuff.
No doubt we could, in our situation, steal Iraq’s oil and bear it away on ships, but that’s not really considered polite these days. But of course if we were starving/collapsing/dying, we would do it.
August 5, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I haven’t read Keely’s book, but I’ve heard the basic thesis in a number of other publications.
Iraq’s oil isnt’t located in an electronic bank account. It has to be piped out of the ground continuously, with infrastructure and logistics maintained.
August 5, 2009 at 1:07 pm
It’s worth noting that the Inuit make many distinctions between properties of snow – it’s just that they don’t have distinctive words for types so discussed. Part of the problem is that many Native American languages could express entire grammatical sentences in what would seem to an European to be single words.
The tendency of German to make ‘names’ for a thing by squeezing together individual descriptors doesn’t mean that German has many more words than other languages; it’s just a funny convention.
August 5, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Shackeleton’s expedition was stranded for years in the Antarctic, a fairly interesting survival story. I recently listened to his book via librivox.org, a notable resource that has free audio of most of the more famous out-of-copyright books. These guys certainly had a very fine-grained understanding of ice, snow, and icebergs, despite lacking any odd nouns for them.
I don’t highly recommend Shackleton’s book but libirvox I do recommend. One might as well listen to some fine books while doing mindless chores of any kind.
August 5, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I haven’t read much about Shackleton. I think it was a few months ago I read about a different arctic/antarctic expedition where the boat got stuck in the ice for a few months and one or more of the crew went off the deep end. I can’t remember more specifically what expedition it was.
August 14, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I think the linguists look pretty bad about the Eskimo snow. It looks to me that they’re just whining about people not grovelling enough. It’s suspicious about how they go on about how the examples never pin down a particular Eskimo language.
The original Laura Martin article doesn’t even say it’s false, she just tries to construct a genealogy. It is clear that people just make up numbers, which is a something to condemn. Pullum repeatedly asserts that it’s false. At the end he and says it wouldn’t be interesting if it were true. But if there’s such a big prior, it’s reasonable for people to repeat the story without seeking other sources! And if it’s false, as he asserts, that is interesting, but clearly he doesn’t think so. Finally, he makes a half-assed search of a West Greenlandic (Inuit) dictionary and choose a very narrow criterion to get two words. Someone else, more sympathetic to the claim, using a more recent dictionary gets 49 (via wikipedia, whose contributors are interested in answers, not just scolding)
For melendwyr’s reasons and others, it’s a tricky question. The best answer I have was produced for Pullum’s book, the third place his essay appeared. He finally sought out an expert but he has the gall to have the last paragraph explain that he doesn’t care about the truth, he just wants to condemn other people who don’t care about the truth. Anyhow, Woodbury says 15 words for the (Central Alaskan) Yupik.
Is that a lot? I think it’s about the same in English. But, according to the theory I read on the web 5 or 10 years ago and would have held, except that I expected Pullum was actually going to say something, English has a ridiculously large vocabulary; as a proportion of common English words, it’s surely much smaller than Yupik. Does French have 15 words for snow? Here we know the grammar and can count words in a dictionary; the main problem is filtering out “common words.”
Maybe this comment is too harsh on Pullum. I didn’t notice the appendix when I read his article the first time and only found it when I went back to find which language gave him the number 2 [which I see now he got from Martin’s footnote]. I’m just mad at the linguistics blogs (including Pullum’s own LL) for asserting “it’s wrong” for years with no more detail than a wave at Pullum’s paper, which didn’t convince me when I finally looked at it. And the particular post you link to? it’s basically correct. The main problem is that you have to change “linguists” to “the one linguist willing to be quoted by laymen at cocktail parties.” (Woodbury explicitly says “two dozen” is reasonable.)
I like this post where an a
nthropologist says that the Siberian Yupiks don’t have snow (precipitation)
and thus don’t have many words for it, but do have lots of words for ice. So “which language” does matter.
I got all these links from wikipedia. It was gracious of LL to link to wikipedia which does manage to collect information, even if it’s unable to reach conclusions because LL is watching.
August 14, 2009 at 8:39 pm
I’m impressed. I had read it was a myth in a number of places before, but maybe they were all just referencing the same lame argument. They usually said something along the lines of “there about the same number of words” or occasionally that Eskimos had fewer, but usually without giving actual numbers.
Thanks for linking to the listserv. I hadn’t heard before that there was a dispute over whether they had “abstract”/general words for “snow” rather than specific varieties.