Lake Superior got its name “on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent”.
Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#32Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#33I live next to Suolijärvi, "bowel lake". I guess the name reflects its shape: https://maps.app.goo.gl/w6wUmBF6m5r6U3eJ9 There's also Särkijärvi, "roach lake" (as in the fish) nearby; presumably there is (or once was) a healthy roach population there. The most common lake name in Finland is Pyhäjärvi, literally "holy lake" or "sacred lake", but apparently the original meaning of the word pyhä was something like "demar…
I live close to the Paranoá lake, that on the indigenous language it comes from means "lake"...
I'd say it's descriptive.
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#34I live next to Suolijärvi, "bowel lake". I guess the name reflects its shape: https://maps.app.goo.gl/w6wUmBF6m5r6U3eJ9 There's also Särkijärvi, "roach lake" (as in the fish) nearby; presumably there is (or once was) a healthy roach population there. The most common lake name in Finland is Pyhäjärvi, literally "holy lake" or "sacred lake", but apparently the original meaning of the word pyhä was something like "demar…
I live close to the Paranoá lake, that on the indigenous language it comes from means "lake"... I'd say it's descriptive.
I also found Vesijärvi on the map in the next municipality over. "Water lake". As opposed to what other type of lake exactly?
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#35Obviously this is just for fun, but I am a bit disturbed about similar projects that try to gain some meaningful insights out of vast public data sets without the slightest attention paid to the quality of the data used. It doesn’t matter how much processing you do or how clever your algorithms are if the underlaying data is inaccurate, out of date, inconsistent, non-normalized, incomplete, etc. No dataset is perfect…
Also they didn't consider that a green lake, while it may not appear green, can still be more green than all the other types of lake.
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live close to the Paranoá lake, that on the indigenous language it comes from means "lake"... I'd say it's descriptive.
I also found Vesijärvi on the map in the next municipality over. "Water lake". As opposed to what other type of lake exactly?
Salt? I don't know if there are any in finland tho.
Does finnish differentiate between fresh and sea water? If it's near the coast I imagine it could have been named thus to differentiate it from a nearby gulf?
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also found Vesijärvi on the map in the next municipality over. "Water lake". As opposed to what other type of lake exactly?
Salt? I don't know if there are any in finland tho. Does finnish differentiate between fresh and sea water? If it's near the coast I imagine it could have been named thus to differentiate it from a nearby gulf?
"Vesi" means generically any kind of water and there are compound words for seawater and freshwater just like in English. There are several Vesijärvis in Finland, and now that I googled it, it's conjectured that the word vesi in the name does not refer to the water in the lake but rather derives from an archaic word meaning "outlet river".
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#38[deleted]
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#39How else would you name a lake?
If there is only one lake, you call it "the lake".
If there's more than one lake, you have to name it either after someone, by a feature it has that others don't, or by something nearby.
Re: Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?
#40In the west of Ireland there are two lakes:
Lough Yganavan and Lough Nambrackdarrig.
The spellings come from the anglicisation of
1. Sandy Lake and
2. Red Trout Lake
so the namers kept things simple in their native tongue but now the names are almost indecipherable.
That seems common enough.