Yes, your professor was right: from wikipedia Basically yellow snow would be a compound word like "yellowsnow", so depending on your definition of a word, maybe you could say there are thousands of ways to say snow in Esquimo... but that would not be very accurate and representative of reality.The claim that Eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for snow is a widespread idea first voiced by Franz Boas and often used as a cliché when writing about how language may keep us more or less alert to the differences of the natural world. In fact, the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but the structure of these languages tends to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word.