I believe this is the case and the wiki summary seems to agree.
> Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation in Language Log: The list of snow-referring roots to stick [suffixes] on isn't that long [in the Eskimoan language group]: qani- for a snowflake, apu- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others -- very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.
The Lexical Elaboration Explorer app does not allow one to see the actual words for snow for any language, so the tool is mostly a geographic and word-density plotter, but neither the article nor the website add much nuance to this debate. The hypothesis is fairly obvious: languages have words for common things. It's not really falsifiable and I find this type of analysis typical of modern research. Sloppy, surface-level, coding-tutorial demonstrations of mostly useless data display.
It kind of goes in the other direction, too. Can you say that Chinese doesn't have a word for "because" because 因为 is actually a compound of 因 "in accordance with" and 为 "the purpose of"? Does English not have a word for "ratel" because instead they use two words: "honey badger"? Does that imply they're more important to French culture than to English culture? Is Haiti a transgender paradise because Kreyól lacks gendered pronouns so clearly gender isn't an important concept in Haitian culture?
I'm not going to say that language doesn't say anything about culture in general. But I do think that most specific analyses chasing after this idea are doomed to say more about the analyst than they do about the analyzed.
