The Origin of the Myth
The first reference in the literature to Eskimos and snow is from Franz Boas in 1911
In making the point that some languages use separate words to refer to related concepts, another can use a single word and modify it
Thus, English has the single word snow which we use to form other words: snow storm, snow house, snow drift, but Eskimo has aput ìsnow on the groundî, gana ìfalling snowî