Tag Archives: Franz Boas

Fact or myth? The claim that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for “snow” was first loosely attributed to the work of anthropologist Franz Boas. It was then promoted by Benjamin Lee Whorf and became a flagship example to support his controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis (also known as “Whorfianism”). This hypothesis posits that aContinueContinue reading “Do Eskimos really have 400 words for snow?”