I wonder if Eskimo actually does have 60 words for snow (or any number large enough to be noteworthy).

The linguist Geoff Pullum (whose article style I have always been reminded of by Phil Factor's) looked at how these probably inflated word counts arose in his amusing and readable short essay The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

He locates an early 20C writer who, musing on specialised vocabularies, suggests that Eskimo might have a number of terms for snow. The writer only mentioned four examples, but the idea was attractive, and any subsequent commentator seemed compelled to improve the point when quoting it. Pullum sees the number of words rising over the years to "one hundred" (New York Times, 1984) and "two hundred" (a weather forecast in same year;). I expect we've all heard various numbers since then.

Disappointingly, there might only be two Eskimo terms for snow - that's all Pullum can find in the Dictionary of West Greenlandic Eskimo Language (1927). These root terms will turn up in multiple forms of course - just as English word snow crops up in snowball, snowdrift, snowflake, etc; but if you count these forms then English will also have a large number.

Anyway, that's enough sidetracking of the discussion: all this is in the article if you're interested (http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf) . In the end neither the answer nor the question, "how many words does Eskimo have for snow?", turns out to be straightforward.