Yes languages and descriptions are surely very interesting. I am not sure i agree with you that people were so ignorant they could not differenitaite clouds from snow, regardelss if they hadnt seen snow before. Mostly due to snow being a land based layer and clouds being airborne. In fact i would argue most primate species wouldnt confure the 2. And i assume H. Sapiens is probbaly far more observant and think deeper in these terms of 3 dimensions than our cousins, even a few hundred years ago and when sailig onto new shores. As @the_bear says, many navigators see clouds as related to land base on certain features. Maybe not all, but surely none confused them for snow.
On many Polynesian islands, clouds hanging low on volcanic mountains is almost a daily phenomenon, due to sea breezes getting stopped by volcanic mountains.
For someone who has never seen snow before, seeing mountain ranges covered with snow from a boat out at sea would have seemed very similar.
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Tahiti! Looking pretty impressive.
Guy
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I do understand your point. We will probably just have to agree to disagree but i dont buy that people sailing the seas and skilled enough for those details are that naive. I do see how language might describe it like that (much like modern day common language has the same word for different things as well), but i dont buy they were that dumb.
Eg. Google pic
Based on very basic vision one can tell land based vs floating air based entities 
I don’t see why people describing something they’ve never seen before using another thing they know well should be considered as dumb. I guess that’s the fundamental differences we are having in this discussion.
I’ve already demonstrated that even today the word Maori use to describe snow and frost is derived from the word for foam and froth churned up by ocean waves that they are familiar with. If they can use foam and froth to describe snow once they’ve arrived and get really familiar with snow, I don’t see why they couldn’t be poetic and describe the snow capped coastline as long white clouds before actually starting to live there.
… but i dont buy that people sailing the seas and skilled enough for those details are that naive. I do see how language might describe it like that (much like modern day common language has the same word for different things as well), but i dont buy they were that dumb. By dumb i mean i dont they they lietrally thought they were the same, morethat they used used same words to describe it. Just like many modern languages do, though we understand they are in fact different.
