William Hovingh points out to me that John McCain (quoted in The New York Times, though you'll need to register to read it), has added an interesting variation to the "what Eskimos have words for" universe:
Particularly disturbing, he went on, is the rapid pace of [global] warming.
'The Inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin,' he said, 'and now there are robins all over their villages.'
Tragic. How will they get along, with no word for it? They'll be singing (in one of the eight Eskimo languages): "When the red, red [embarrassed silence] comes bob, bob, bobbin' along, along..."
Perhaps the first serious thing to say about this nonsense is that, as Cameron Majidi points out to me, English also lacked a word for the bird in question, which is a variety of thrush (it has the unpleasant-sounding Latin name Turdus migratorius). The North American bird now known as the robin has nothing in common with the very differently colored and sized bird called a robin in Britain. Settlers in North America had no word for the russet-chested thrush-sized bird they were faced with, so they ignored the issue of accurate species classification and just used the word robin for it. Senator McCain's researchers probably gave no thought to the possibility that the Inuit might also call this bird "robin", borrowing the word from English, just as English speakers call a house built of snow blocks an "igloo", borrowing from the Inuit.
People overlook such obvious possibilities because the bafflingly unstoppable human drive to be fascinated by what-words-do-they-have questions (regardless of any lack of data) tends to blind people to the simple fact that loanwords, coinages, and other additions to the language make that issue almost totally uninteresting.
Nor have the staffers who prepared this Eskimological shaft of wisdom for the Senator looked in an Eskimo dictionary. The Comparative Eskimo Dictionary lists two or three terms in several of the Eskimo languages that would cover small birds such as thrushes, with rather indeterminate species denotation (when you hunt in the Arctic you aren't necessarily all that interested in the exact species classification of an uneatable thrush or sparrow weighing about two ounces). Those words would do. And with the astounding word-compounding techniques that Eskimo languages have, they could build a word for "red-breasted small brown bird" in a second. That's the key thing about the Eskimo languages that laypeople don't grasp: they don't need a whole lot of basic unrelated roots for different sorts of thing (snow or robins or anything else), because they can manufacture them on the fly in an instant.
One more nerdy and dyspeptic linguistic note is that McCain's research staffers are considerably overestimating the age of the Eskimo language family, which contains the Yup'ik languages of Siberia and Alaska and the Inuit or Inuktittut languages of Canada and Greenland. The Yup'ik started moving down into southern Alaska, and the Inuit groups started moving into northern Alaska heading eastward, only about a thousand years ago (both groups have seen various multi-year warming and cooling trends during the intervening years). The whole Eskimo (Yup'ik-Inuit) family is only about two thousand years old. In fact it's only been about four thousand years since Proto-Eskimo-Aleut (the ancestor language for the Eskimo and Aleut language families) was spoken. Before that, the speakers of the even earlier ancestor languages were somewhere in eastern Asia, and ten thousand years ago, for all I know, there may have been robins bobbin' along all over the villages of the pre-Proto-Eskimo-Aleut peoples on the Asian continent, named with some robin-denoting word that the migrants to the Americas then forgot.
Remember to take all your words with you when you move to another continent; you never know.
[Drafted November 16; revised November 17 and 18,2004.]Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at November 16, 2004 08:51 PM