I mentioned in the original post, way back when, that I was fascinated in my school days by the Eskimo/Inuit. I didn’t mention that I read a great deal about them over a fairly long period of time, and became rather knowledgeable (book learning only, of course) about their society. And although I’m not one of those Rousseauvian-noble-savage folks by any means (in fact, one of these days I plan a post on how much harm I think Rousseau’s point of view has caused), I do have a deep and abiding respect for traditional Inuit culture–a culture which, as you so rightly point out, has changed immeasurably in the last hundred years.

I have no special knowledge of the language, but one thing I can say is that the Inuits were among the most inventive people of all time, prior to mechanized Western culture. The fact that they managed to exist in such a tremendously challenging and harsh environment is a testament to human ingenuity. They were incredible at fashioning gadgets that were both functional and beautiful:

The improvising abilities of Inuit are well known today, and many Inuit inventions are considered technological masterpieces. The domed snowhouse igloo, the toggling harpoon head and the kayak are noteworthy examples.

I could go on at some length, but I think I’ll stop now. Most likely no one’s reading this anyway :-).

Inuktitut, Inuit, whatever — are agglutinative languages. They are primitive methods of expressing yourself, and very unsophisticated. They simply ram words together to make other words. [emphasis mine]

The strong implication here is that you believe these languages to be inferior by virtue of their agglutinative nature. Why else bring up agglutination in the first place, or criticize them for “ramming” words together? I actually think I should get an A+ for assuming you meant that Inuit is unsophisticated because it is agglutinative. If that’s not what you meant, the rest of your quote makes no sense.

And oh, when your best comeback is to parse the spelling errors of your opponents, this is a bad sign for your core arguments.

It’s been fun, Sippican.

Let’s review: I wrote:

Inuktitut, Inuit, whatever — are agglutinative languages. They are primitive methods of expressing yourself, and very unsophisticated.

That’s the topic at hand isn’t it? Does a primitive culture have more ways to express something than a technological one?

You really should buy a dictionary. “Primitive” has an actual meaning, and is an assessment, not a pejorative.

“of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal”

English allows the writer to express things in a lapidary manner. If I had intended to say that all agglutinative languages are inherently unsophisticated, I would have said: “All are primitive” or “These are.” “They are” in context refers to Inuit, which did not even have a written component until europeans wrote it down for them, if memory serves. You’d like to believe I don’t know the difference between the language spoken at Heidelberg University and the one spoken by Nanook of the North in his igloo, but it’s just not so.

You should learn to read in your native tongue before offering yourself up as the unelected representative of all primitive cultures everywhere, demanding apologies for imaginary slights.

And you shouldn’t spell primitive “primative.” It’s not spelled “denegrate,” either.

Your’re probably a nice person and fairly bright, and I still hope we can occupy the planet together, nicely, but now let me quote Phil Connors from Groudhog Day:

“I’d like to stay here and talk to you, but… I’m not going to.”

For the record, I disagree with many friends on many topics. However, my friends usually have well-thought-out reasons behind their beliefs, reasons I can understand even if I don’t agree with them. And my friends also know when to admit they are wrong (as, I hope, do I).

So please, either give me a spirited defense of why, say, Japanese is an inferior language, or be an adult and admit you were wrong.

If you can’t do either, consider me to have passed on your offer.

Well no, not quite yet. I admitted I was wrong to call you names. So far you have admitted you were wrong about nothing, and apologized for nothing. As a start, do you think you could admit you were wrong to say that agglutinative languages are “primative” and “unsophisticated”? I think that would be a bare minimum to salvage my respect for you.

Take a lesson from the case of Tookie Williams, and realize that there can be no redemption without admission of wrongdoing.

I like words a lot. One of the most satisfying accomplishments of my “word” life was to make a joke in a foreign language, in a foreign country. Romance language I’m afraid, nothing agglutinative…

And the Totie Fields line was supposed to get a laugh. Stop me before I subreference again.

I think you are right — I should not have called you an idiot. I disagree with many if not most of your points, but all the same I should not have called you that. I apologize.

I don’t usually get riled up in internet conversation, but some things you wrote struck a nerve. For instance, you wrote:

“Inuktitut, Inuit, whatever — are agglutinative languages. They are primitive methods of expressing yourself, and very unsophisticated. They simply ram words together to make other words.”

No you did not use the word “barbaric” here (though you did use it elsewhere), but the message is clear nonetheless — you believe there is something very inferior about these languages.

I spent two years of my life studying linguistics, and I think there is very little support for that claim. Moreover, I used to hear it or something like it almost every day. They have a name for it — it’s called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and, in its most general statement, it holds that language circumscribes our ability to understand the world. Hence, more words for snow means the speaker experiences snow more richly. Fewer words and the speaker doesn’t know a snowflake from an iceberg. The implication of this hypothesis is that languages like Inuit, which for historical reasons have smaller vocabularies, limit the range of thoughts that their speakers can have.

People take this hypothesis into the realm of grammar as well. I can’t tell you how many people (non-linguists) have told me that American society is self-centered and materialistic because English puts the subject first in the sentence. So the silliness cuts both ways.

However, the conscensus in the linguistic community, which I agree with, is that all such theorizing is bunk. There appears to be only a tenuous link between cognition and language. If people don’t have a special word for freshly-fallen-deep-snow, they simply say “freshly fallen deep snow” and leave it at that. Any language is capable of expressing any idea, though some do it in fewer words than others.

So I’ll say to you now, there is nothing wrong with agglutinative languages. They are all over the world and they work as well as any others. Also, I think that if you were to speak a language with a smaller vocabulary than English you’d find that your thinking was not too badly impaired.

Now on to your other main point, that our society beats the pants off of Inuit society and all other traditional societies. For starters, I believe that technological and economic development improves our lives. If you don’t think I’m sincere, you should know I’m currently getting an PhD in development economics, so I do take this stuff seriously. However, it is just plain wrong to state categorically that we do everything better. In general, technological progress breeds dependence. When the technology fails, we are far more helpless than before. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing on balance, but there are certainly tradeoffs. Traditional societies did some things very well, better than we do. But I’ll take modern society, thank you very much, and nowadays many people from traditional societies would agree (i.e. Inuits on snowmobiles).

So I’ll try to keep from calling people names, and I hope in the future you will hesitate before making broad statements about the worthlessness of traditional societies, or denegrating the languages of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Inuit is not a sophisticated language. Saying that everybody and everything in the world is identical and equally worthwhile is silly.

Anyone who’s ever listened to UN speeches being translated and smiled while the poor translator sits and murmurs “waiting for the verb, waiting for the verb, waiting for the verb, and then tries to blast the whole sentence out while listening to the next transcontinental German sentence with the verb nailed to the end knows that all languages are not created equal, or are equally useful for various things.

The Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo couldn’t have been written in Inuit. The language doesn’t have the horsepower.

And the page I directed you to,if I pasted it in correctly, has hyperlinks on it. Click on them, and you get many pages of snow words.

The Inuit are currently hunting seals on snowmobiles. The people you are “defending” from my critique of their language do not exist anymore.

One of the reasons I do not care for the worship of primitive cultures is that I’ve seen first hand what happens when words turn to deeds and people who deserve every opportunity to remove themselves from poverty and misery are kept like human pets in an ecological habitrail, for the amusement of intellectuals.

My ancestors painted themselves blue and clonked Roman Legionaires on the head with clubs. Being unimpressed with their runes wouldn’t make me anti Irish, would it? Assessing the viablity of primitive languages in the modern world is not bigotry.

And you should mind your manners. I’m interested in your opinions, and you seem well educated, but calling people stupid and idiots is not the way to make friends and influence people.

Frankly, I don’t think that the number of words for snow (or anything else) in English or Inuit or German really matters a whole lot. I did, however, take offense at several of your claims.

1. That English has “hundreds” or “thousands” of words for snow. This is patently untrue. (It’s equally untrue of Inuit but you weren’t claiming that.)

2. That agglutinative languages are inherently barbaric. This is untrue and has the added bonus of being offensive to any Japanese, Finn, or Hungarian in the room. Indeed, many Germanic languages have agglutinative nouns, which is why I mentioned long German words. This point in particular pissed me off because it is so poorly supported and, frankly, ridiculous. And this more than anything led me to call you an idiot — that you would believe that the grammatical structure of a language (shared by many disparate languages throughout the world) would offer a key insight into the barbarism of their disparate speakers. This, my friend, is stupid.

3. That the fact that some modern Americans could survive the tundra means that we are at least as good at wilderness survival as the Inuit. If you can believe it, I am not someone who would like to go back to the tribal lifestyle. However I will call a spade a spade, and the simple truth is that there are a few areas, like wilderness survival, where the Inuit have us beat. You seem to want to deny this to the end of the earth.