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I read somewhere that the native peoples living above the arctic circle didn't have words for rape or murder in their language prior to encountering European whalers that encroached on their culture through shipwrecks and such. They had a rich language...thirty five words for snow for example. Has anyone else read about this or heard this?

BobMcDowell 6 Feb 2
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the words for snow thing is bunk, which makes me question everything else you wrote since it probably came from the same source.

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When I read this book...the first thing I thought was..."great, survival up north meant that the group needed each other so much that they never even thought about killing a fellow village/tribe member" and second..."great, free love/sex openness like a commune or something...sexual sharing...no big deal, no marriage or what ever"

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Whaling ships used to go from Whitby, North Yorkshire to Anchorage. Having worked in Whitby and met some of the men from there this wouldn't surprise me. 🙂

Seriously though, I just don't understand rape. If a woman didn't want sex she wouldn't enjoy it - so neither would I. How can you do really interesting things if she's got her eyes closed?

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While I am not very familiar with the "Eskimo" languages, you can bet they did have words of some sort for Rape and Murder because it was not terribly uncommon between tribes/villages.

Nanook of the North was a movie I used to show during the Niagara Falls Winter Festival of Lights. Though entertaining, it is not a good source of cultural information.

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English didn't have a word for the German 'schadenfreude', until it adopted the word itself a few years ago. But watching someone try to walk through a glass door when it's closed has always been funny, as long as they don't seriously injure themselves.

The male drive to force himself on a female who doesn't want sex is seen in other mammals (dogs being a good example.) Human society may have been supposed to rise above it, but it's still there at an instinctive level, since the male's biological purpose is to spread his DNA as far and wide as possible. The only way a society ends up not having rape is if you ignore the need for both parties to consent. And it's funny how often religion excuses that. It's in the bible that it's okay to rape a woman as long as you marry her (and once married to her, you can presumably rape her as often as you like) and Islamic fundamentalism continues to treat a captured female as a sex slave. A perfectly acceptable way to behave under their interpretation of Sharia.

Murder is similar. People will sometimes want to kill each other. Sometimes they go through with it, either because they think they can get away with it, or because they are sufficiently psychopathic that they don't consider the potential consequences.

I don't believe for a minute that any human society is immune from rape or murder.

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Oh. Agglutinating language. Like German. So, to say hard snow, they put words for hard and snow together to make a new word.
So, 35 words for anything.

Allan Level 5 Feb 2, 2018
2

Talked to an anthropologist who was in a village when a man came into a woman's hut in the middle of the night. She asked if the woman was afraid of being raped. Then she had to explain the concept, and the locals found it laughable.
I gather the idea of a man annoying of a woman and then exposing your penis and balls to attack seemed ridiculous.

Wow, what if rape and sexual violence isn't inherit to humans?
It might just be western culture, and rape really is about power and male privilege.

Allan Level 5 Feb 2, 2018

I've heard similar said of New Zealand Moaris in respect to domestic violence. In something like 75% of cases it is the man who ends up in hospital often with serious injury.

If you honestly believe this you've never spent time in China, Japan, or Korea.

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Current Inuit culture has sexual assault rates among the highest in the world. Just because they didn't have a word for it dorsn't mean it didn't exist. People are people sadly.

Isn't consensual sex an aberration from primary programming/ genetic drive to simply continue the species?

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Without digging much into it... does not meant did not happened. I read native american couldn't understand the concept of land ownership. And then europeans brought progress.

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Cultures that depend on cooperation to survive would probably have much less problems with rape and murder. My hunch is that the more a people depend on civilization it would follow the less civilized they are to one another.

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But they do have 36 words for snow. It's whatever's relevent.

godef Level 7 Feb 2, 2018
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Well the thing is that just because they don't have the words for these acts, you cannot infer that these acts were absent in their culture.

[theguardian.com]

cava Level 7 Feb 2, 2018

Language is a reflection of a culture. If the society has the need for something, there will be a word. No need, no word.

However, this article does not backup this claim. Instead it says the victims told mo one, not that their were no words to call the acts.

@EllenDale I think this is a mistake. The way language is used is a reflection of culture, but language itself as a series of signs is indifferent to culture and not all words in every language are translatable without resort to description rather than exact word match. A language may not have a name for a color but that does not mean that people who don't have that word can't see that color, which would be rather odd.

@EllenDale Isn't it a bit like libel? What one person considers slanderous to them another doesn't. What is now considered paedophilia was once simply accepted mating practice. I doubt this can be attributed to civilisation any more than religion can be attributed to civilisation.

@PhitDoctor50 I think reality is phenomenal. Yes I am interested in language theory. Sure vocabulary as used reflects a culture, words have histories which affect how words are used in any language. A dictionary presents a history of language use. But there is another aspect to language, the squiggles on a page have no meaning beyond our use of them, the squiggles are signs we recognize that form the basis for the semiotic system, language.

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Well, when you have to wear the amount and type of clothing required to survive in those conditions, I am surprised they were even able to have consensual sex.

Let alone know who's a man or a woman. Haha

ROFL except that disposal of body wastes are still necessary in the cold ... and I'm sure that they didn't simply do it in their clothes! ... and 😀 unlike the majority of Australian First Nation's People they had nearly 35 different types of snow to clean themselves with!

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I've also heard that. I also read that Gauguin and other Europeans introduced venereal disease to Tahiti and the other Pacific islands.

Certainly introduced it to Australia...not Gauguin but convicts and settlers. Some of the former were also into cannibalism.

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It's also true in other parts of the world, including the US. Many of the indigenous people of the world were doing just fine, until white Europeans showed up. Then, everything turned to shit.

I think the US is where they were the most successful in eradicating most of the origional culture. Atleast in Africa and South America there are still significant populations of origional people. Mabey it is the part of the US that I am from, but the native population here seems very small.

And still happening!

@macrobius And now Europe thanks to the removal of Gadafi.

@macrobius one of the big problems was making them cover their private parts. Seems they forgot to teach them laundering and personal hygiene but they knew of dog. Whoops there's the dyslexia again.

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