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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Inuitt and "snow words"
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Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 19:29:43 GMT
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In article <3ml65q$ac9@newsgate.dircon.co.uk>,
Roger Harris <rwsh@tdc.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
>Inuitt is an agglutinative language; words are made up of stems and 
>roots joined together into what appear to be single words. Each Inuitt 
>word appears to function as a phrase or short sentence. 
>
>While I have not investigated Inuitt snow words as such, the results 
>in the table above suggested to me that Inuitt has a different word 
>for almost everything. Nearly 93% of the words in the stories were only 
>used once and words which occurred no more than twice accounted for
>97.5% of the text! An Inuitt word appears to contain far more 
>information than an English word. Perhaps the final word (no pun 
>intended) on Eskimo snow words will come from a specialist in 
>information theory.

Your results demonstrate the problems with applying concepts (like "word")
derived from Indo-European languages to languages (here, agglutinative
languages) where things work differently.  You can't directly compare a
"word" in an Inuit language with an English word, or count Inuit words
to measure the size of the lexicon.  Words in agglutinative languages
can be created ad hoc from simpler components, according to regular rules.

An example (from an agglutinative language I'm more familiar with, Quechua):
_wasi_ means 'house', _wasikuna_ means 'houses'.  So far so good.
But we also have _wasiy_ 'my house', _wasicha_ 'little house', _wasiq_
'of the house', _wasipi_ 'in the house', _wasita_ 'house (acc.)', and more.
I trust you can see that it would be absurd to claim that Quechua has dozens
of words for 'house' where English has one.  Quechua has one basic root for 
'house', as English does; but many concepts that can be expressed in English 
only with a noun phrase can be expressed in a single word in Quechua.
