>>1912404850 words for snow is a dumb way to word it because it sounds like they just have 50 synonyms that all mean snow. You would think that someone talking about linguistics would be more careful about their choice of words... It would be better to say, that the eskimos have more words for different types of snow and ice than most other languages. Although I am not familiar with the words themselves, I assume most of them are just compound words like they would exist in English.
The claim that eskimo languages had so many words particularly stems from a misconception due to the grammar of the language. The language is highly inflective and the word for snow can be inflected in a variety of ways. To compare it with German, a lot of people unfamiliar with the language may look at the language and say german had 32 articles based on all the forms that exist of them (der, die, das, den, dem, einem, einen, eines etc.) but a native speaker would tell you that there are 2-3 articles (ein+der+depending if you count "kein" as a type of article word") and the rest of them being forms depending on the case and gender of the word it refers to.
