An example of an urban legend thats spiraled out of control, its been believed for well over a century that the indigenous peoples of the Arctic circle are so surrounded by snow that their language has developed around a hundred different words for it. In fact, the two main families of Eskimo languages follow whats called a polysynthetic model: for the layman, this basically means that they combine words, or parts of words, into long structures that have very specific meanings, new suffixes added onto the end. Imagine a short sentence with all the spaces and punctuation removed, and youve got a good idea as to what that looks and sounds like. Given the number of derivations possible with a language like this, its hardly surprising that people got the wrong end of the stick and assumed that these were all a hundred or so separate words for similar things. Its not the case, though as we understand language, these are complicated and complete phrases, not individual words. Comparing our own clause-based sentence structure with the grammatical structure of Inuit or Yupik is like comparing a busy motorway with a runaway train.