Shockingly bad journalism here. The 'hoax' that Pullum wrote about was the specific claim that Inuktitut has a lot of words for snow. This is false, and the referenced paper agrees (pointing out that "discussion of lexical elaboration has been tarnished by unscholarly claims about Inuit words
for snow"). The detailed results of the paper are perhaps of some interest, but at base it is making the very unremarkable claim that languages differ in how many vocabulary items they map to different areas of conceptual space. It could hardly be otherwise.
Shockingly bad journalism here. The 'hoax' that Pullum wrote about was the specific claim that Inuktitut has a lot of words for snow. This is false, and the referenced paper agrees (pointing out that "discussion of lexical elaboration has been tarnished by unscholarly claims about Inuit words for snow"). The detailed results of the paper are perhaps of some interest, but at base it is making the very unremarkable claim that languages differ in how many vocabulary items they map to different areas of conceptual space. It could hardly be otherwise.