You've may have heard the urban myth that, "The Inuit have 50 words for snow." Or you may have heard the more recent urban myth, "No they haven't."
Most recent research seems to indicate that they really do have a very large number of words for snow:
http://m.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html / vocabulary journalist journalistic exaggeration scholarship anthropologist Franz Boas century-long argument traveling icy wastes Baffin Island northern Canada 1880s study the life of the local Inuit people joining their sleigh rides trading caribou skins learning their folklore seal meat language elaborate terms describe frozen landscape softly falling snow piegnartoq the snow that is good for driving sled Inuit Yupik family dialects polysynthesis speakers encode huge amount information one word plugging various suffixes base word languages language family /
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