Dying Languages and Snow Vocabulary

Warren Ellis found an interview with Alexandra Aikhenvald, a linguist who specializes in "dying" languages:

Once I asked, "Can I use this word this way?" and the response was, "Of course, you're foreign, you can say a wrong thing. But I can't say that."

And my favorite comment: I did not realise there could be a word for purple in a language that does not distinguish between green and blue.

Makes me wish I still had my copy of Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, the really old one with the Easter Island cover...

UPDATE: Language Log discusses the article, paying particular note to howa certan misconception about the vast Inuit vocabulary for snow was inadvertently perpetuated:

"The Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation (they're usually called postbases). The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn't that long, though: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit."