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Region: Philosophy 115

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The rose

Red Star of the West wrote:The rose So you are telling me that artic languages don't have more than 50 different words for snow? What's a person to believe in anymore?

I remember being fascinated by the Greenlandic expressions for snow and ice woven into the novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.

It seems to be a complicated matter, without any clear answer?

The hypothesis appears to be not about the absolute number of words, but whether there's a disproportionate number of such words, compared to other languagues. There's the complication that Eskimo-Aleut languages are polysynthetic, they habitually glue words together all the time. What counts as 1 word? What counts as 1 word root? Results appear to differ depending on how people count and what definitions they use. Another approach is functional rather than merely counting: 'In other words, English speakers living in Alaska, for example, have no trouble describing as many different kinds of snow as Inuit speakers.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow

On the other hand, according to that little summary it looks like there is a richness of vocabulary:

'Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin Island'

'Studies of the Sami languages of Norway, Sweden and Finland, conclude that the languages have anywhere from 180 snow- and ice-related words and as many as 300 different words for types of snow, tracks in snow, and conditions of the use of snow.'

Telgan wrote:I wonder what type of arguments or relationaloties or logic really brings us into a conversation more than others? What is the most persuasive?

Maybe we can gather a few examples with this little collection of common misconceptions - fairly innocuous ones, none of which are probably thoughts that people cling to with great passion. One hypothesis could be that when changing one's mind, direct persuasion by another person is not a strong factor. So, I'd be interested in more examples how people remember changing their mind on something-or-other.

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