That is the great Eskimo snow hoax! Here is the tale:
"Speaking of anthropological canards, no discussion of language and
thought would be complete without the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.
Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow
than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred, or one
hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at
two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by
such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush,
blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting, and a
coinage of Boston's WBZ-TV meteorologist Bruce Schwoegler, snizzling.
"Where did the myth come from? Not from anyone who has actually studied
the Yupik and Inuit-Inupiaq families of polysynthetic languages spoken from
Siberia to Greenland. The anthropologist Laura Martin has documented how
the story grew like an urban legend, exaggerated with each retelling. In
1911 Boas casually mentioned the Eskimos used four unrelated word roots for
snow. Whorf embellished the count to seven and implied that there were
more. His article was widely reprinted, then cited in textbooks and
popular books on language, which led to successively inflated estimates in
other textbooks, articles, and newspaper columns of Amazing Facts.
"The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, who popularized Martin's article in his
essay 'The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,' speculates about why the story
got so out of control: 'The alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos
comports so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic
perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw
seal blubber; throwing Grandma out to be eaten by polar bears.' It is an
ironic twist. Linguistic relativity came out of the Boas school, as part of
a campaign to show that nonliterate cultures were as complex and
sophisticated as European ones. But the supposedly mind-broadening
anecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizing willingness to treat other
cultures' psychologies as weird and exotic compared to our own." ~ Steven
Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p. 64
Sigismund Diamond in the 19th century studied the noun/verb ratio in
languages. here is what he found.
"He records an increase in the total vocabularies of these different
peoples, from an average of about 5000 words in the Food Gatherers to the
63,000 represented in a modern English dictionary. More important, the
proportion of verbs decreases from about 50 percent to 14 percent. Diamond
takes this as evidence that language evolved from single verb forms to
increasingly include nouns, and then adjectives and other parts of speech.
"There is perhaps a touch of the nineteenth century to the idea of varying
degrees of 'civilization,' with the English gracing the highest order.
Nevertheless, there can be no denying that cultures do differ in
complexity, and that this difference is reflected in vocabulary size. The
relative decrease in the propportion of verbs and increase in the
proportion of nouns may simply reflect the growing number of objects as
culture becomes more complex and industrial." ~ Michael C. Corballis, The
Lopsided Ape, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 153-154
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm