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Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?

ivanludvig.dev

1–10 of 45 posts

Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?

#5

What, no brown lakes? In Finland there are 121 lakes called "Paskalampi", lit. "Shit Lake". https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=paskalampi#map=18... Then again, at least this is more descriptive than the 13 called Vesijärvi, or "Water Lake".

So in "Paskalampi" and "Vesijärvi", which part of it means "lake"? Naively (I have obviously no clue about finnish), I would have expected some syllables (or token in modern LLM terminology) to occur in both names (i.e. representing the "lake" part).

Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?

#6
The color of a lake in satellite view depends on the satellite's viewing angle (which depends on the satellite's trajectory and the lake's location), the angle of the sun (which depends on the same things plus the time and date the image was taken), the weather, the satellite's sensors (false color is a thing), and how the images are processed before publishing. Overall I think it's almost impossible to estimate the "true" color of a lake from public satellite images, even if you used all pixels instead of just one.

Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?

#7
post #5

What, no brown lakes? In Finland there are 121 lakes called "Paskalampi", lit. "Shit Lake". https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=paskalampi#map=18... Then again, at least this is more descriptive than the 13 called Vesijärvi, or "Water Lake".

So in "Paskalampi" and "Vesijärvi", which part of it means "lake"? Naively (I have obviously no clue about finnish), I would have expected some syllables (or token in modern LLM terminology) to occur in both names (i.e. representing the "lake" part).

"Lampi" means "pond", "järvi" means "lake"

Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?

#10
post #5

What, no brown lakes? In Finland there are 121 lakes called "Paskalampi", lit. "Shit Lake". https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=paskalampi#map=18... Then again, at least this is more descriptive than the 13 called Vesijärvi, or "Water Lake".

So in "Paskalampi" and "Vesijärvi", which part of it means "lake"? Naively (I have obviously no clue about finnish), I would have expected some syllables (or token in modern LLM terminology) to occur in both names (i.e. representing the "lake" part).

In linguistics, the term would be "morpheme"
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