xmas-7: qanniuguma [cw: pandemic]

Qanniuguma - Elisapie (feat. Beatrice Deer)

According to its liner notes, the title of this song translates from Inuktitut into “if I were a snowflake” and its lyrics “speak to the idea of the freedom afforded by being a snowflake- the ability to be directed by nature and travel everywhere, with no worries about the future, certainly ideas that are at the foremost in a lot of minds in 2020”.

I love the idea of being able to step into the breeze and flutter somewhere. It’s been a year of sudden constraints and anxious confinement for a lot of us. I’ve been thinking lately about the tensions between societal coordination and individual freedom, but my half-formed thoughts on that subject are much less interesting than:

THE GREAT [INUIT] VOCABULARY HOAX.

which is the title of Geoffrey Pullum’s extremely salty essay (from 1989, before Inuit was the widely-accepted name for Arctic native peoples) that describes the “the multitude of snow descriptors used by these lexically profligate hyperborean nomads” as an “accidentally developed hoax perpetrated by the anthropological linguistics community on itself”.

He blames Benjamin Whorf, who he describes as a “Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier” (!), for turning a textbook’s point about independent versus derived nouns in different languages* into a “xenomorphic fable” perpetuated through “successively more careless repetitions and embroiderings in a number of popular books on language”. A longer quote:

Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about [Inuit] in bad linguistics textbooks? Take a random textbook like Paul Gaeng's Introduction to the Principles of Language (1971), with its earnest assertion: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of the [Inuit]... snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes...". Imagine reading: "It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers... fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes..." Utterly boring, if even true.

There’s nothing quite like an absolutely scathing paragraph to definitively rearrange one’s beliefs, eh? The essay (PDF link again) is a highly entertaining tale of how a piece of shoddy, stereotyping scholarship can gain cultural traction. I recommend it enthusiastically! (Along with this song, which in the space of just five minutes, dances through what feel like three different percussive movements, tapping strings and throat-singing and (finally! gorgeously!) drums clattering in around 3:30.)

—Tessa

* English uses a common root “snow” for “snowdrift” and “falling snow”, but has different words for “lake” and “river”; we could imagine a different language with a common “body-of-water” root. Inuktitut has a larger number of roots for snow (around a dozen, according to a Canadian Encyclopedia page on the topic) and is an agglutinative language, so many additional nouns can be formed by adding modifiers to the a root (so qanik translates to “falling snow” and qanittaq ("added snow") refers to freshly fallen snow).