The myth began with a 1911 remark by anthropologist Franz Boas, who cited four Inuit roots related to snow. Benjamin Whorf's examples later implied seven, then the figure swelled to 50, and even 100 in a 1984 New York Times editorial. In 1986, anthropologist Laura Martin traced this inflation. Above all, counting 'words' makes little sense: Inuit languages are polysynthetic and build sentence-long words at will. And English has snow, slush, sleet, blizzard…
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.