Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 July 21

= July 21 =

"Lake/River/Mount _" in some other languages
So in English, Latin, and I assume most Romance languages, a basic geographic feature would usually be identified by the type of geographic feature followed by the given name of said feature (River Nile, River Severn, River Rhine, Lake Victoria, Mare Nostrum, Mare Germanicum, Mount Vesuvius, Mons Oliveti, Insulae Bahamenses, etc.), or somewhat more rarely, the name first, followed by the geographic feature (usually applied to seas, oceans, islands, or if the name is from an adjective or attributive, such as Great Salt Lake, Grand Canyon, Atlantic Ocean, Yellow River, but of course there are those that are not that such as the Yangtze River, Easter Island, Olympus Mons, Aetna Mons, Caspium Mare; I don't really know if Latin actually bothers to make a difference in whether Mare/Mons/Flumen/etc. should be before or after a name; the one exception I know off the top of my head is Pontus Euxinus, which is a direct borrowing/transliteration from Greek).

However, in some languages such as German, I've noticed that this practice is almost non-existent, referring to everything as proper nouns with definite article (der Nil, der Severn, der Rhein, der Vesuv, der Olymp, der Ätna, die Bahamas, der Atlantik) with some exceptions (das Mittelmeer, die Nordsee, Kaspisches Meer) and calques (Gelber Fluss). I'm sure there's some inconsistencies here-and-there, but at least in English, to my understanding it is mostly up to individual preference on whether to call it "the Nile (river)" or the "River Nile", it will usually be understood regardless, and that applies to just about any geographic feature. But in say, German, there is only "der Nil", "die Bahamas", or "der Vesuv"; nobody ever says "Nilfluss", "Bahamainseln", or "Vesuvvulkan"/"Berg Vesuv", etc. Is there a reason for this, and will it even be understood by native speakers in this manner, regardless of academic correctness or not? Perhaps they just hold a higher emphasis on proper names than English-speakers do? 72.234.12.37 (talk) 10:22, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * In English, it is also common in colloquial speech to drop the geographic feature from things, so for example, it is very common to hear "The Thames" or "The Mersey" (i.e. "Ferry Cross the Mersey"). This is true for water features in many varieties of English, regardless of whether it is common to put the feature after or before; i.e. in America, one  also speaks of "The Mississippi" or "The Chesapeake" without the addition of "River" or "Bay".  -- Jayron 32 11:16, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Also, in French, it is common to also not use the feature name. It is just le Rhin and not commonly "le fleuve Rhin", and La Manche, not "le détroit de Manche" or something like that, though the feature is sometimes named as such, as in détroit de Malacca for Malacca Strait.  -- Jayron 32 11:46, 21 July 2023 (UTC)


 * I live along the Kern, up in the southern Sierra. It gets impounded by Lake Isabella (or maybe it's Isabella Lake), and usually never reaches the Pacific, though it might overflow into the San Joaquin this year. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 20:55, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I spent some time this summer on the Merced it was similarly swollen when I was there, in Yosemite, the falls were especially intense! -- Jayron 32 13:02, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It makes a difference whether the feature is named for something else. La Manche is not the strait of a sleeve, it is itself a figurative sleeve; whereas Malacca is an adjacent state. —Tamfang (talk) 15:13, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, but French still has many examples where they don't label the type of water body as in English. Besides many rivers and La Manche, there's also Léman, for example. -- Jayron 32 18:15, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Isn't it obvious? We Germans are just so much more educated. We know the Nile is a river, the Bahamas are islands and the Vesuvius is a volcano. That's why we don't have to mention those facts every single time. Interestingly it is a little different with lakes. There "-see" or "See" ("lake") is usually part of the name: Bodensee, Genfersee, Starnberger See, Chiemsee, etc. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 18:26, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I get that it is rather redundant in hindsight and that standard education would negate the need for it regardless, but say if someone were to say "Nilfluss" instead of "der Nil" in a couple of sentences about the river, and a German native were to hear/read that, would it still be understood like normal by the native speaker, or would the former be given a funny look because it comes off as stilted, unnatural, childish, overly meticulous, or something else? 72.234.12.37 (talk) 17:04, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The education thing was just a joke. It's just that in German the kind of feature is often not part of the name. So "Nilfluss" would be incorrect because that just isn't the German name of the river. You could say "der Fluss Nil" ("the river Nile") if for some reason you wanted to emphasize that it is a river. If you say "die Bahamas Inseln" instead of "die Bahamas" it means that you are referring to the islands, not the island nation (a rough equivalent would be "the islands that make up the Bahamas"). With lakes it is usual that "-see" or "See" is part of the name and that you cannot omit it, e.g. if you said "Starnberger" instead of "Starnberger See" people would react with "the Starnberger what?" because they would know that you were referring to something related to Starnberg, but not that you were referring to the lake. In the case of mountains "-berg" is sometimes part of the name and when it is you usually cannot omit it. In the case of the oceans "Ozean" is part of the name, but you can use short forms in some cases e.g. "Atlantischer Ozean"/"Atlantik", "Pazifischer Ozean"/"Pazifik", but there is no short form for "Indischer Ozean". -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 17:37, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * In Spanish it is also possible to drop the qualifying noun and leave the proper noun if the feature is well known, for rivers ( el Amazonas,  el Nilo, but not  el de la Plata), mountains ( el Everest), lakes ( el Titikaka), etc. Pallida  Mors  23:05, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It is more complicated: el Plata as in Mar del Plata, but Río Grande, Río Negro, Monte Perdido, Valle de Arán, Sierra Morena and lago Ness not Ness. --Error (talk) 17:17, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * (edited answer) Take notice of my caveats: No one will get the reference if you say el perdido instead of Monte perdido. That's why the conditional phrase on the needed unambiguity and conspicuity. Also notice that some of your examples are built over a structure different from the double noun proposed by the OP: negro in common use is an adjective, and de la Plata is a prepositional construction. Pallida  Mors  22:35, 26 July 2023 (UTC)
 * The OP is wrong. The Nile, Severn, Rhine, Vesuvius, Thames, Avon, Everest, K2, Atlantic, Pacific, Yangtze, Ganges, Bahamas, etc are not "normally" identified by what they are. DuncanHill (talk) 18:31, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Proto-Indo-European word for "five"
Dear Wikipedians:

I noticed this:

penta-: five

Pompeii: five hamlets

Punjab: five rivers

Could I take this as evidence that the proto-Indo-European word for "five" started with the "p" syllable?

Thanks. 23.91.239.138 (talk) 14:22, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, you could. See Wiktionary. Deor (talk) 14:39, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
 * And see also finger.--Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 02:11, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
 * And pum, Welsh for "five". Alansplodge (talk) 15:24, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, but only because Celtic (like Italic) underwent a sound change whereby p...kʷ became kʷ...kʷ, which is why the Latin word for 'five' is quinque and the Irish word for 'five' is cúig. Welsh (and Oscan, the language where Pompeii gets its name from) then later underwent a sound change turning kʷ into p. Original p disappeared in Celtic, so if p...kʷ > kʷ...kʷ hadn't happened, then the Irish word would be *úig instead of cúig and the Welsh word would be *um(p) instead of pum(p). —Mahāgaja · talk 20:19, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
 * A Proto-Indo-European word starting with "p" gives rise to a native English word starting with "f". This is an example. (However, "four" starts with f not because it arose from such a word, but because [sometime in the evolution of modern English that postdates when the Germanic branch diverged from other branches but before English diverged from other Germanic languages] children accidentally attached the initial sound of "five" to "four". If the English word "four" had gone through all the steps it had gone through to become what it is except the above, it would have been "whour". (A few non-Germanic languages might have gone the same way, and Russian went a similar way for nine; their word for nine starts with d as opposed to n for a reason paralleling the above.) Georgia guy (talk) 19:20, 22 July 2023 (UTC)
 * A similar development affected the non-IE Modern Hebrew numeral 8: it got its irregular stress pattern (on the penult) because of its position between 7 and 9, which are both segolates. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 06:08, 23 July 2023 (UTC)