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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

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More than you ever wanted to know:

The snow words myth: progress at last - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/...

Bad science reporting again: the Eskimos are back - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419

"Words for snow" watch - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax - https://web.archive.org/web/20181203001555/http://users.utu....

"Eskimo Words for Snow: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example" - https://www.jstor.org/stable/677570

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow

As a brief aside, I think "Inuit" is the preferred term for people mistakenly called Eskimo.

As the first article linked to explains:

> the language family is generally called Eskimo or Eskimoan, because it includes the Yup'ik languages of Siberia and Alaska as well as the Inuit languages from the northeastern half of Alaska across Canada to Greenland

And I've heard Eskimo is a preferred collective term for North American indigenous arctic dwellers, because Inuit is just one tribe/ethnicity among a few!

So it goes.

Just think about it from the other direction.

To most Australian Aborigines, whites are called "Hollanders".

How much are you offended by that?

> How much are you offended by that?

Tremendously :P where I'm from "hollander" is a type of pipe fitting.

Well, you should have discovered Australia first then.

.. but I am thinking about if from the other direction.

From the perspective of the non-Inuit Eskimos.

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