Eskimo Myth 

Urban legend has it that Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. There have been many suggestions as to the specific number of unique words dedicated to the subject, estimates have ranged from dozens to thousands!

The roots of this confusion are understandable, but the fact is Eskimo languages have no more words for snow than English!

The first thing to clarify is that there is no one Eskimo language. Many cultures are referred to as Eskimo, and they all speak different languages, which are termed Eskimo-Aleut languages.

Eskimo languages naturally have more than one word to describe snow. Yupik, for example, spoken in Alaska and the Russian Far East has been estimated to have around 24 words for snow. That may sound like a lot, but English has at least 40 words dedicated to snow or the description frozen water, including "berg", "frost", "glacier", "floe", "hail", "ice", "icicle", "slush", "flurry", and "sleet"

If you take the word "ice" and put together with other words such as "berg", "sheet" or "black", it begins to explain how this myth was started.

By applying this logic, the number of Eskimo words for snow is unlimited, particularly so because Eskimo languages are polysynthetic. Polysynthetic languages allow noun incorporation, resulting sometimes in long single words that are the equivalent of a phrase in other languages.

What an English speaker would describe as "frosty sparkling snow" a speaker of an Eskimo language such as Inuinnaqtun would call "patuqutaujuq", which means "is covered in frosty sparkling snow". The concept is the same in both languages. This is true of things other than snow: "qinmiq" means "dog", "qinmiarjuk" "young dog", and "qinmiqtuqtuq" "goes by dog team".