909: Inuits have 50 Words for 'Snow' (A Myth) Jun 5, 2017

There is something of a myth surrounding the claim that Eskimos, more commonly now called Inuit-Yupik peoples have so many words for different kinds of snow. Depending upon where you may look, this number can range from 50 words to a couple hundred, but this misconception that began with Franz Boas is incorrect for two reasons. First, there is not a single language that the peoples from the arctic speak, with the Inuit-Yupik languages referring to three language-families, each with different languages that make them up, so to make the claim about the vocabulary as if it were consistent for all of the many languages in this group would be a huge generalization. Second, it does not take into account the structure of these languages and the way words are formed therein. In Inuit-Yupik languages, incredibly long words are made by placing many affixes all around a single root word such that theoretically a word can be a whole clause by itself. Due to the highly synthetic nature of these languages, what would require adjectives or gerunds in English, such as to say 'drifting sea-ice' is one word in these other languages, making it seem like there are more ways to express the same idea when in fact it comes down to nothing more than syntax.