2025 RationalWiki 'Oregon Plan' Fundraiser

There is no RationalWiki without you. We are a small non-profit with no staff—we are hundreds of volunteers who document pseudoscience and crankery around the world every day. We will never allow ads because we must remain independent. We cannot rely on big donors with corresponding big agendas. We are not the largest website around, but we believe we play an important role in defending truth and objectivity.

Fighting pseudoscience isn't free.
We are 100% user-supported! Help and donate $5, $10, $20 or whatever you can today with PayPal Logo.png!
Donations so far: $10064.65Goal: $10000

Draft:Eskimos

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This is where you can find Eskimos

Eskimos are people native to the very north of North America and Greenland and to a lesser extent some parts of Siberia. The term "Eskimo" is sometime considered offensive by the people themselves because it would etymologically mean "eater(s) of raw meat", but this is probably a folk etymology and it is not widely accepted among linguists. Eskimos are typically divided into two main subgroups: Inuits and Yupiks. Although closely related, Aleuts are not Eskimos.

Some popular misconceptions about Eskimos[edit]

Many words for snow[edit]

This is a very common misbelief. It is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that the structure of our language influences the way we think, and vice versa, hypothesis which is know largely discredited. Linguists found that Eskimo-Aleut languages have nearly the same number of words for snow than English does.