Readings: Deep Time Mexico, Neanderthals, Early Mammals

Relish these articles.

1) Mexico City Deep Time Sickness.  Modern day Mexico City is built on the bed of lakes that formed around 2 million years ago. The Mexica people in the 14th century constructed a series of dams and dykes partitioning salt water and fresh water areas. They developed agriculture called as 'chinampas' on islands made up of mud and organic debris. This region became the city state of Tenochtitlan. Later in the 16th century this vast lake was drained by Spanish Conquistadors. Over time, extraction of groundwater is causing compaction of the soft sediment. The ground is subsiding unevenly across different parts of the city. Ground shaking by frequent earthquakes is making the problem worse. As cracks grow and widen, buildings tilt, and the ground shakes, the citizens have become acutely sensitive or "tocado" to geology altering their everyday lives.

"Deep time is often framed as something antithetical to immediacy, something totally separate not only from everyday experience, but also the idea of history itself. But if we are living in a moment in which experiential time, historical time and deep time are colliding, which of these times are being written onto the walls of Mexico City apartments?" 

A beautiful and unnerving article by Lachlan Summers.

2) Did Neanderthals Speak? Archaeologist Anna Goldfield summarizes our current state of understanding of the throat anatomy of Neanderthals and how they might have sounded. There is a nice audio clip too! 

3) Warm Blooded Mammals. When did warm bloodedness or endothermy evolve in mammals? Katherine Irvine writes about a new study of ear canal bone structures indicative of endothermy. An analysis of fossils suggest that warm bloodedness, along with a host of traits typically associated with mammals, arose by around 233 million years ago. 

Books: Animal Minds, India Language History, India Governance

 New on my book shelf:

1) This came highly recommended from science Twitter. Peter Godfrey-Smith has surveyed a wide section of the animal kingdom and writes about the evolution of sensory experiences in different species. Sponges, corals, worms and octopus all manipulate the environments in specific ways. Disparate evolutionary pathways to be sure, but they all inform us about the origins of our mental capacities. 

 

 

 

2) I had a brief introduction to this book over a chickoo milkshake when the author M. Rajshekhar had visited Pune couple of years ago. He has spent several years traveling across India, surveying both big cities and the rural regions. His Ear to the Ground project resulted in scores of articles on India's everyday economy and the general failure of governance in this country. Its good to see some of his work distilled into this book.

 

 

 

3) Live History India has a really good interview with Peggy Mohan about her new book on India's language history. This is always a fascinating topic, as it tells us so much about population history, their origins, migrations, and intermingling. There is a section on Marathi too, and I'm looking forward to learning about that.

Links: Petroglyphs, Language, Urban Groundwater, Dams

Some interesting articles I came across past few days.

1) Pleistocene Rock Art in India- New York Times covers the discovery of ancient rock art (40k-10K yr old?) carved on laterite plateaus of Ratnagiri District, S. Maharashtra. Good to see credit given to the stellar work of two amateur archaeologists Sudhir Risbud and Dhananjay Marathe.

Link: Ancient Rock Art In The Plains Of India.

2) Language Evolution- Linguistic analysis suggests that the Sino-Tibetan language family originated about 7200 years ago among millet farming communities in northern China.

Links: Paper - Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan.
Summary - Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research.

3) Urban Groundwater- This is an issue that is gaining importance as cities in India grow and municipal water supply from surface reservoirs becomes inadequate. S. Vishwanath crunches some numbers on the ground water potential of the shallow aquifer underneath Bengaluru. It comes to more than hundred billion liters! Similar situations exist underneath other Indian cities as well, but urban groundwater has been a neglected area of study. More quantitative understanding of aquifers is needed along with a focused effort to recharge ground water.

Link:  Revisiting The Shallow Aquifer. 

4) Environmental Implications of Pancheshwar Dam, Uttarakhand - A review in Current Science of environmental concerns regarding the proposed Pancheshwar Dam in Uttarakhand implies that critical aspects of seismicity, slope instability, and high sedimentation rates have not been addressed in detail during the planning stages in the environment impact assessments carried out so far.

Link: Environmental implications of Pancheshwar dam in Uttarakhand (Central Himalaya), India.

5300 Year Old Iceman's Bacteria Genome Does Not Support Out Of India Theory

The genome of bacterium Helicobacter pylori found in  the stomach of the 5300 year old European mummy named the "Iceman" shows close similarity with Helicobacter pylori strains found in the gut of north Indians. This finding published in Science has been used as evidence to support the Out of India theory, which proposes that the Aryans and the Indo-European language family originated in India. One branch of it spread into Europe, diverging into various IE languages, while the branch which remained in India became the common  ancestor of Iranian and Sanskrit. A later migration into Iran founded the Iranian branch of the IE family.

Here is a tweet by Subhash Kak, one of the proponents of the Out of India theory.

He and others who use this finding of the bacterial genome to support this scenario are wrong.

Here's why.

Their scenario requires the European strain of Helicobacter pylori to have been derived from the Indian strain. That means people from India migrated  into Europe in the Neolithic-Early Bronze Age around five to six thousand years ago carrying with them the Indian bacterial strain which then evolved into the European variety found in the Iceman. This interpretation is demonstrably wrong. The analysis of the bacterial genomes clearly shows that the Indian strain shares ancestry with the European strain

" The resulting linked co-ancestry matrix (Fig. 4) showed that the ancient H. pylori genome shares high levels of ancestry with Indian hpAsia2 strains (Fig. 4, green boxes), but even higher co-ancestry with most European hpEurope strains".....

... "Furthermore, our co-ancestry results indicate that the Iceman’s strain belonged to a prehistoric European branch of hpAsia2 that is different from the modern hpAsia2 population from northern India".

In plain English what this mean is that the European strain has not evolved directly from the Indian strain.  Rather, the European strain and the Indian strain share an Asian common ancestor. This is clearly seen in the phylogeny (evolutionary relationship) presented in the supplementary materials of the  paper (page 50 of 88). See the image below.

Source: Supplementary Materials Maixner et al. 2016

The red arrow points to the common ancestor of the Iceman and Indian strains. The Iceman's strain and the Indian strain are sister lineages. The European strain is not derived from the Indian strain. The most sensible explanation of this finding is that from a common Asian source in the Anatolian / Near East region this bacteria spread into Europe and into India with the Neolithic expansion of farmers. It then diverged into the respective strains seen in the Iceman and in extant Indians. In Europe, this Asian derived strain then mixed with an African variety due to a migration in more recent times.

No evidence can be  found for a bronze age Out of India migration of people and languages from this study of the Iceman's bacterial genome.

Science Writing In India - 2 Writing In Hindi

In the Special Focus section on Science writing in India in Current Science Sopan Joshi writes about the difficulties of writing about science in Hindi:

The world of science has developed a great bias towards English. The research comes from the English-speaking world,so the idiom is culturally English. The Hindi readership is not familiar with this idiom. For example, imagine the words required to explain plate tectonics in Hindi. For most scientific terms, there are translations in Hindi. But those translations mean nothing to the average reader. In fact, they mean very little to even the students of science. Because they are never used outside the classroom.

Each writer has to negotiate this problem on his terms, given his limitations. In my experience, using the metaphor of labour is useful. So, in a Hindi article on the world of computers, I have used the metaphor of carpentry to explain the nuance of a graphical user interface. To talk about the relationship between an operating system and computing software, I have found myself using the image of railway tracks and trains running on them. To talk about climate change and its impact on the monsoon, I have drawn from Hindu customs and mythology.

While this makes the material more accessible to a wider readership, it also dumbs down the narrative. One gets the feeling that there is no room for the beauty of complexity. Since there is very little written on science in the Hindi media, one also regrets the absence of a peer group. When you are  struggling with a choice of words, because you cannot think of words and phrases that can convey the meaning accurately and interestingly, you need peers to bounce off ideas, get feedback.

Since almost all post-high school science education in India is in English these problems do apply to other Indian languages as well.  Sopan Joshi should take heart that the Science Bloggers Association of India has put together a Hindi language science writing ecosystem which could provide him a sounding board for his ideas.

The world of science has recently developed a bias towards English, but don't forget there is a vast research literature in Russian, French, German, Chinese and Japanese, countries that unlike India have been using native languages for post high school science education.

Before Darwin: Dante Alighieri On Language Change

My Book Shelf  #21

I came across this passage in Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler. The topic is the change of Latin in to various Romance languages post demise of the Roman Empire in Europe:

The first theorist of these new linguistic developments is none other than the leading Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who lived from 1265 to 1321. In his De vulgari eloquentia he recognized that Latin, grammatica, was in essence the preserved older form of the Romance languages. He seems to have had as much difficulty in convincing his audience that these ancestral differences were the predictable result of gradual change as Darwin was to find with a different subject matter and timescale, five centuries later.

Nor should what we say appear any more strange than to see a young person grown up, whom we do not see grow up: for what moves gradually is not at all recognized by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognized the more stable we think it is.  So we are not surprised if the opinion of men, who are little distant from brutes, is that a given city has existed always with the same language, since the change in language in a city happens gradually only over a very long succession of time, and the life of men is also, by its very nature, very short....

The italicized portion is Dante Alighieri's analysis.

So then how do we know that a particular language has descended from an older language or that two languages are sister languages, both having evolved from an older language? And the same could be asked of species. How do we know that two species are related and evolved from a common ancestor? 

On The Use Of The Word SUSTAINABLE

From xkcd comics:

 From the extrapolation it looks like that by the year 2109 we haven't yet figured out a way to live "sustainably", which is why people are desperately repeating the word "sustainable"!

By the way, the trend up to 2010 in the figure isn't just made up. The increase in the word "sustainable" from 1960 to early part of this century is true. Here's the usage frequency of the word from 1900 to 2005 as depicted by Google Ngram.  I have plotted it along with three other terms- climate change, global warming and sustainable development to understand why it might have increased.

The increase in the word sustainable begins in the 1970's as the environmental movement made its mark and books on that topic began to appear, while climate change and global warming start being used more and more from the mid-late 1980's onwards.

The Future Of Gas Prices

via- Language Log

Geology Word Usage Using Google Ngram Viewer

I don't have the answers but I've been having fun with Google Ngram Viewer, a tool that can track the change in frequency of word usage through time.

Google has relied on about 5 million books containing a total of 500 billion words digitized from library collections to come up with a graphical view of word usage changes. The algorithm compares the frequency with which a particular word occurs in these five million books compared to all other words. You can go as far back as 1500 but the more reliable results are from about the 1800's. You can also view the list of books that the word occurs in.

You can find out when a word first came into use, how its popularity waxed and waned through time, and by pairing words with similar meaning or contexts try to figure out why the frequency of that word usage may have changed. That may reflect cultural trends, fashion or maybe new developments in a scientific field, technology or something else.

The tool doesn't offer any explanation why a word has become less or more common.

I plugged in a few geology terms.

Aqueous rock - all the way from 1800.

The word aqueous for describing rock or sediment formed in water was popular in the 1800's, but as science advanced, slowly has given way to more specific terms that describe the conditions in which sediment was deposited.

Peneplain, which describes a low relief surface caused by prolonged weathering. - 1900's onwards

I've added the words landform and geomorphology to see if the decline since the 1940's  could be due to less interest over time in studying landforms. You can see though that both landform and geomorphology show a marked increase in usage. Likewise, the terms erosional surface and planation surface do show small but significant increases in use. I think the use of the word surface in isolation and as a suffix to a word that described the process of feature formation, both terrestrial and marine, became somewhat the norm. With a more process oriented approach to describing features, Peneplain may have just become a less fashionable way of describing low relief weathered landforms.

How about the way geology departments are named? 1900 onwards..

You can see that the term Department of Geology is the most common way of naming a geology department. It term show a steady increase through the 1900's with a surge around the mid 1960's, peaking in the 1980's and then declining. That may reflect a smaller number of newer geology departments...?

Accompanying this pattern though are a number of other ways of naming geology departments.. the terms Geology and .. Earth Sciences.. Earth Sciences and... become more common beginning the 1960's. The increase in Geology and... may reflect the hardening of geology specializations like geophysics and geochemistry. Departments acquired multiple specializations with important faculty presiding over their respective domains and hence were named accordingly.

Regarding the term Earth Sciences.. check out the usage of these two terms - interdisciplinary and holistic.

Both show a marked increase beginning the 1960's and point to more collaboration between different fields, an increased awareness of the importance of understanding the interaction of the geosphere with the biosphere and atmosphere, a generally increased tendency to study the bigger picture.. hence more department names reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of their endeavors.

Finally the influence of technological developments - the words maps and mapping - 1900 onwards.

Both show a steady increase through the last century and that does reflect the increased exploration and scrutiny of various aspects of the earth. The term mapping though shows a marked increase in usage through the 1970's.

Two technological developments may have helped. In 1972, the Landsat remote sensing satellite program became operational and began releasing earth images for public consumption, thereby making it easier to map the earth's surface. Satellite imagery is now commonly used for mapping.

And in the mid -late 1980's computer assisted mapping tools like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software started becoming available resulting in increased access to geographic data and new ways of compiling maps.

So.. plug in your favorite geology term, analyze its rise and demise.. have fun!

...OnPoint Radio has an interesting talk on Google Ngram.

Self Domestication Of Humans And Symbolic Language

There are topics I like to read about and I think I am understanding the subject matter as I read along. But if asked to explain that to someone else.. I would probably draw a blank.

The evolution of language is a fascinating topic and on NPR's Cosmos and Culture blog language experts Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough write a post on the evolution of symbolic language in humans:

The world of symbols is an artificial niche, its ecology radically different from the biological niche we also occupy. In the same way that beaver dam-building has created an aquatic niche to which beaver bodies and behavior have adapted over their evolutionary history, our cognitive capacities have adapted to our self-constructed symbolic niche.

..and this very interesting take on how domestication or rather establishment of a particular social and cultural niche in early human societies may have prodded the evolution of complex language:

Recent investigations of birdsong offer some clues in thinking about language evolution.

As expanded in an earlier blog, a comparative study of a recently domesticated bird and its feral cousin revealed that the domesticated lineage is a far more facile song-learner, with a much more complex and flexible song, despite the fact that the domesticated bird was bred for plumage coloration, not singing.

That this behavioral and neural complexity arose spontaneously was surprising given the common assumption that song complexity evolves under the influence of intense sexual selection, which was not operant under the breeding regime. One intriguing interpretation is that the relaxation of natural and sexual selection on singing was in fact responsible for its complexification. With song becoming irrelevant to species identification, territorial defense, mate attraction, predator avoidance, and so on, degrading mutations and existing deleterious alleles affecting the specification of the stereotypic song would not have been weeded out, the result being a reduction in the innate biases controlling song production. With specification of song structure no longer strictly controlled by the primary forebrain motor center, auditory experience, social context, learning biases, and attentional factors could all begin to influence singing, the result being that the domestic song became more variable, more complicated, and more influenced by social experience.

Relaxation of selection may have led to phenotypic plasticity - in this case an increased repertoire of behavioral /audio responses - being tolerated and eventually the genetic basis for this increased range was positively selected for over evolutionary time and became an adaptive feature.  I think this is called genetic assimilation or the Waddington effect.

I may be wrong about this being an example of genetic assimilation... but...in any case the article is worth reading.

A Collection of Geological Haiku

The Haiku meme I started some time back got quite a good response. I have posted below links to all the aspiring poets in the geoblogosphere who contributed. As I had hoped the meme mutated as it spread through the population of geologists. My initial rule of a reference to a geological time period was made more fluid and rightly so I think to a reference to the passing of geological time or a reference to a geological process. Bloggers also wrote short accompanying explanations and posted visuals too. That made for some imaginative and evocative verse.

If I have missed anyone let me know and I will update the list.

In no particular order:

• Bryan at In Terra Veritas
• Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment
• Lockwood at Outside The Interzone
• MJC Rocks at Geotripper
• JJ at The Ethical Palaeontologist
• Life Long Scholar at The Musings of a Life Long Scholar
• Kim at All My Faults Are Stress Related
• Dave at Geology News
• Short Geologist at Accidental Remediation
• Neat Rox at Neat Gemstones
• Chris at Highly Allochthonous
• Kenneth Clark at Office of Redundancy Office
• Sciencewomen at Sciencewomen
• Rob Clack at Dem Bones Dem Bones
  
• Suvrat at Reporting on a Revolution

To end this thread since climate change is the issue all of us are going to be grappling with over the next few decades some thoughts:

warm chill warm
a mere blip Holocene
until the big freeze

The Geology Haiku Meme

Announcing the Geology Haiku Meme

deep in a bioreef
a Permian story
calcite dripstones tell

Respond Geobloggers!

Rules: Three lines and a max of seventeen syllables. Use of kigo, which is the traditional reference to a season, may be substituted by a reference to a geological period. The use of kireji, which is a word that serves to give structural support to the verse is not widely practiced in English haiku, so you may give that a pass.

Leave a link in my comments section and I'll post a collection of Geology Haiku links soon :-)

See: A Collection of Geological Haiku

The Beginnings of India

Last week I caught a Discovery Channel special on India called The Story Of India. The first episode was The Beginnings. It was presented by the British historian Michael Wood who has also written a book about this topic. I settled down to watch expecting the story of India to begin with agricultural societies represented by the Indus valley civilization.

To my pleasant surprise Michael Wood took the story way back to Africa and the late- Pleistocene migration of Homo sapiens from Africa around 80,000 years ago. These humans migrated into India soon thereafter taking most likely the coastal route from Arabia into India. There are still relict populations in India which have believed to be descendants of these early settlers. I wrote a post about this some time back. These include the mainland tribals like the Korku and the Kuruba and those in the Andaman chain of islands like the Sentinelese. Mitochondrial genetic analysis supports this contention as the Korku and the Kuruba have one of the oldest mitochondrial genetic markers outside of Africa. The figure below shows migration routes of Homo sapiens reconstructed from genetic analysis.



Source: Univ. of Texas

Wood meet some of these tribal communities and discussed rituals that may be holdovers from very early times. There were some silly moments like when he asked one of the tribals "how does it feel to be the first human in India", but he did highlight the genetic work that is being done to unravel the history of early human presence.

From early Pleistocene settlers the show moved on to the Holocene and the enigmatic Indus valley civilization which lasted from around 3500 B.C to 1800 B.C. Wood talked a lot of town planning and trade between the Indus valley people and centers of civilization in what is now Iran and parts of the Middle East and then talked a little about the demise of this civilization caused most likely due to an increased aridification of the western Indian continent beginning around 2500 B.C. The show then moved on to the arrival of people starting 1500 B.C., speaking an Indo-European language, proto-Sanskrit. The locus of Indian civilization migrated eastward to the Gangetic plain but Wood emphasizes that there is a continuity in the cultural transition from the Indus valley to the Gangetic plains. The focus was on how these Sanskrit speaking people developed the Vedic culture and complex societies around the Gangetic plain. Using linguistic and archaeological evidence he traced the origin of these Sanskrit speaking people to central Asia.

What was left out from this rather predictable but decently presented sequence was any mention of where and when did Dravidian speaking people originate. This is the other big language family in India today, spoken mainly in the south of the country. Dravidian is considered by many linguists as part of the Dravidian-Elamite family of languages that once were spoken all over the northwestern part of Indian subcontinent extending into Iran. Exactly where the center of origin of this language family was is still uncertain but geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforva suggests that it could have been the northwestern part of India or it could be farther west towards Iran and the Caspian region.

What is clear is that Dravidian or proto-Dravidian speakers were in India before the arrival of proto-Sanskrit speakers. Linguists like Colin Renfrew suggest that it is likely that the entry and spread of Dravidian languages in India coincided with the farming dispersal and agricultural expansion that began in the Middle East and which expanded into north western parts of the Indian subcontinent around 8,000 years ago. Dravidian languages entered India through demic diffusion of agriculturists and Dravidian speaking people were the first Neolithic farmers of India. This extended history of Dravidian language origin and dispersal was given no attention in the show. These people are the likely candidates who built the Indus valley civilization and Wood missed out on exploring this thesis further. I've noticed this in many documentaries about India. The attention is always on the arrival of the "Aryans" a term used to describe people speaking Indo-European languages. They in fact arrived much later than Dravidian speakers. Today Dravidian is spoken mostly in the south, an example of language displacement by latter arrivals. There is however a northern enclave in Pakistan where Brahui, a Dravidian language is still spoken.

This is not really a rant on Dravidian vs Indo-European languages. I mentioned that Indo-European speaking people displaced Dravidian languages to the south, but Dravidian speaking farmers too must have displaced or made extinct Austro-Asiatic languages or other unclassified languages spoken by the earlier hunter-gatherer settlers of the continent. The history of India is one of immigration and emigration and superimposition of layer upon layer of language, culture and ethnicity.

I particularly liked one sentence Michael Wood said about India:

India is a country where all the pasts of the human species are still living.

That is a very evocative description of the country and its people. It makes you imagine the great antiquity of human habitation in this part of the world.

Persian in my Genes

This article on the innate nature of language appeared in the Education Times Pune section of Times of India on Sept 23, 2003 (no link available). It is a good example of how the "genes for something" concept is carried to extreme lengths. It 's written by Mr. Sumit Paul, a linguist who occasionally writes columns on language in the Pune Section of the Times of India. In this article Mr. Paul tells a story of a child of Persian descent but adopted by English parents who suddenly acquired an urge to study Persian. This to Mr. Paul was proof that language is in the genes and that adopted children brought up far from their ancestral land may not only grow up with a desire to speak their ancestral tongue but may actually inherit the accent of their biological parents language even if they have had no contact with their biological parents.

Wow! I am sure Mr. Sumit Paul must have listened real hard to hear that "faint" Bengali accent in a child who grew up far away from its Bengali parents ‘cause I sure have not heard a trace of any Maharashtrian accent from my cousins and nephews growing up in California. Language is innate in the sense that a baby has a genetically determined innate ability to learn to speak a language. The ability to speak in any particular language or accent is not innate that is there is no genetically wired circuitry in your brain for speaking in a particular language or accent which is passed down from parent to child, but instead depends entirely on which language and accent a child hears when he or she is growing up. That means that Marathi speaking parents from Pune do not pass on genes for speaking Marathi in a Puneri accent, but just genes for abilities to learn language. Stories like the one about the English child opting to learn Persian and Urdu without ever knowing about his Muslim mother prove nothing. The child in England did not grow up miraculously speaking Urdu or English with an Urdu accent, he had just chosen to study Urdu. He could not have inherited his mother’s language but there is a good chance he inherited her looks. A child with dark hair and dark skin may be treated differently by his white peers while growing up, thus inducing a desire in the child to learn about his roots. Or, it could have been something as trivial as enjoying mutton biryani in a restaurant and then deciding that he wanted to understand this particular culture. Why does a white Australian with no Indian parentage choose to learn Sanskrit? There are hundreds of random unplanned influences from the environment that can determine such choices.

A language prevalent in particular communities may, according to the article, "percolate down to the next generation with remnants of their pristine character” which presumably means an accent. The reason for this is that people have a tendency to marry within their community and therefore their children grow up listening to their parents and neighbor’s accents and not because genes for speaking in a particular accent are being passed down. Stories of a faint accent of the biological parent’s mother-tongue in adopted children brought up in a different environment are usually myths perpetuated by hope and a feel-good factor of the continuity of one’s linguistic heritage. That language is a serious matter for people is evident in sentences like "a language is not only an individual's part of existence, it’s his whole consciousness embedded in his physiological and psychological roots". What exactly this means and how it explains accents being passed down generations is anybody's guess! When the circumstances of these cases are closely examined they reveal some environmental influence which was not taken into account. Ruskin Bond and Tom Alter speak English with an Indian accent with no trace of any British accent but BBC anchors Nisha Pillai and Geeta Gurumurthy speak with a British accent without any Indian accent however faint! Language may be in one's genes but an accent is surely not.

The Loveless Inuit

In their article Voiceless Requiem (Times of India, June 10 2003), Jug Suraiya and Vikas Singh write about language, its importance to humanity and the sad decline and eventual disappearance of hundred’s of languages. They then go overboard and claim that language is so embedded in the human experience that it creates the reality that we see around us. They subscribe to the extreme form of linguistic determinism. This version claims that for example cultures that lack words for certain colors cannot perceive those colors. Or that Hopi Indians don't think of time as past , present and future a conclusion based on the apparent lack of words to describe time. Both these and many of such extremes claims have been shown to be patently false. But Suraiya and Singh seem to have overlooked the literature of false claims. They begin by falling hook line and sinker for the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax which is that Inuit have tens of different words for snow. Urban legend had earlier inflated the number of Inuit words for snow to 200 plus. Current Inuit language dictionaries and linguists have brought it down to a more modest 2! The number 11 quoted in the article is a generous count for snow and snow related phenomenon, not much different than English expressions for the same.

Not satisfied with burdening the Inuit with a vast vocabulary for snow, Suraiya and Singh then claim that the Inuit language does not have words for romantic love. Apparently living in strongly bonded communities precludes the need for Inuit’s developing special attachments to other single members of the tribe. This is an absurd idea, but I followed it up and emailed a linguist expert on Inuit languages. After he had stopped laughing he emailed me a list of words for romantic love in Inuit dialects. Here are some examples, “piqpagigikpi¤” in Inupiaq Eskimo, North Slope dialect, kenkamken in Yup'ik Eskimo of Southwest Alaska, asavakkit in West Greenlandic all of which mean “I love you”!

Humans all over express an identical range of personal emotions and needs regardless of whether they live relatively solitary lives or part of strong communities. Even if the Inuit didn’t have a word for romantic love, one cannot automatically conclude that they don’t form special attachments. This myth i.e., since people speak differently, they must also be thinking differently, has been discredited by linguists and cognitive psychologists. Apart from formal research, one just has to glance at Inuit language novels or movies depicting lust, love, greed, jealousy and revenge to realize that the Inuit develop over their lifetime a range of intense personal relationships with other single tribal members, no different than humans living elsewhere. And yes, they have words to express all of them in their rich language.