Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin Island. Pullum argued that the fact that the number of word roots for snow is about equally large in Eskimoan languages and English indicates that there exists no difference in the size of their respective vocabularies to define snow. A subsequent influential and humorous, and polemical, essay by Geoff Pullum repeated Martin's critique, calling the process by which the so-called "myth" was created the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". The first re-evaluation of the claim was by linguist Laura Martin in 1986, who traced the history of the claim and argued that its prevalence had diverted attention from serious research into linguistic relativity. A good deal of the ongoing debate thus depends on how one defines "word", and perhaps even "word root". Franz Boas did not make quantitative claims but rather pointed out that the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but the structure of these languages tends to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word.
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