Another illusion bites the dust - or the snow -
from: Lingua Franca (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National)
October 3, 1998
"Prepositions"
Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: preposition hunting in
the Brisbane suburbs, with grammarian, Geoff Pullum.
...
Geoff Pullum is a linguist who is also a satirist. The author of many books
and articles, he is probably best known in linguistic circles for his essay
collection, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, published in 1991, which
contains title like 'Here come the linguistic fascists' and 'The
linguistics of defamation'.
The title essay explodes the popular myth about Eskimos having lots of
different words for 'snow'.
They don't apparently, and, says Geoff Pullum, 'no-one who knows anything
about Eskimo, (or more accurately about the Inuit and Yupik families of
related languages spoken by Eskimos from Siberia to Greenland) has ever
said they do.'
- John Tranter, Jacket magazine
from John Tranter
Editor, Jacket magazine: http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/welcome.html
Ancient history - the late sixties - at
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/index.html
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