That the Inuit (there is no one Inuit language, but work with me here) have 50+ words for snow, as the legend goes, is both true and untrue. It’s true in the sense that the word or words for snow can be conjugated and modified in the various related Inuit languages in a way that leads to more than 50 words for snow. Or more than 100 — but that’s because this language family works differently in the method it uses to assemble compound words and verbs than English does (in most cases). I don’t want to get too far in the weeds of it all here, but Inuit languages would be more like German than English.

For instance, we might say something like “the fast snow falling now.” In an Inuit language variant, that’d be all one word, like “fastfallingnowsnow.” So in the context of English, that’s all one word. But in its own context, that’s just a stem to which suffixes and affixes and phonemic modifications can be attached. In other words, the words in our hybridized generic Inuit language work fundamentally differently! They are incomparable in important ways to English.

Thus, that’s why I say that to our eyes and ears it seems like an Inuit language has a whole lot of words for snow but a speaker of the Inuit language would not, for the most part, see it that way.