There are decades of scholarship on those cognates, and a longstanding view that in Proto-Indo-European the word meant simply "large body of water" and not specifically "sea". Moreover, it may be a substrate word borrowed into European IE languages, as the affinity of that Sanskrit word to this cognate set is not very certain.
Yep, it's the same in Māori, a Polynesian language, where "moana" refers to oceans and large lakes alike.
What's really interesting is that in Hawaiian, a close relative with some sound shifts (k/t, l/r, n/ng, so taboo is kapu in Hawaiian, in Māori, tapu, path is ala / ara, the God of the sea is Kanaloa/Tangaroa) they have more than one word for ocean, kai is coastal waters, moana is the deep ocean.
But it makes sense in the geographical context of both societies and how they evolved to their environment, the Hawaiian archipelago is made up of multiple smaller islands separated by waters exposed to the full force of the Pacific, while the archipelago of New Zealand is dominated by two large landmasses separated by a narrow strait that together are about the same area as Germany.
So the Hawaiians remained more tightly wedded to the sea to build their archipelagan societies than the Māori did.
In fact, the Māori lost the knowledge to build ocean-going vessels like the ones that had carried them to New Zealand within a few hundred years because there was no need for it. And their language lost the distinction between "coastal waters" and "ocean" while Hawaiian retained them.
While we have evidence of Māori traveling to Raoul in the Kermadecs early on, as classical Māori culture evolved on much much larger islands, their technology focus on boats switched from ocean going vessels to coastal travel and river travel.
In fact, while "Wai", water, is often considered the Māori word for "river", there's another word that also means river in Māori:
Are there any large lakes in Polynesia? The Māori, Hawaiians, etc are one group of people I would expect to make a distinction between lakes (puddles, really) and open ocean.
Lake Taupō, the largest lake in New Zealand, is about the size of Singapore.
The Hawaiians distinguished between coastal waters and open waters because in their archipelago of far smaller and more numerous islands, the distinction between the two was important. Think currents, waves, depth.
And I guess I failed to adequately make my point, but I'll try again - when the Polynesians who would become the Māori reached New Zealand, the far larger islands they now inhabited lead them to focus far less on oceanic travel as they pivoted to a focus on the land and rivers they now inhabited.
So a big lake was effectively the same as the ocean for them - a big body of water.
Yes, there are many substantial ones in New Zealand. Lake Taupo is an obvious one, and there are some large ones in Otago and Southland which are not abutting the sea.
I would imagine Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones, since they need to be able to drink. Even small islands can have pools.
[Edit to add: much of Polynesia is of volcanic origin, so freshwater crater lakes are a feature of these landscapes.]
> Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones
Māori distinguished water _quality_ without reference to whether or not it was a lake or sea or river.
Wai tai: Salt water
Wai māori: Fresh water, water for regular daily usage
Waiora: Pure water that restored/healed a person
Waikino: Dangerous / polluted water
Waitapu: Sacred water
Which makes sense right? You can have a river that is significantly salty and hence unpotable some distance from the sea, depending on the strength of the tides - likewise you can have a lake near the sea that intermingles with seawater to the extent that it's brackish.
So Māori naming was more based on utility than the geographical distinctions than we're used to in the Eurocentric worldview.
And this also extended to their view on land ownership, which caused so many issues when Europeans turned up and wanted to "buy" "land" from the local iwi/tribes - a chief would grant a European the exclusive rights to grazing in an area, and the European would interpret it as exclusive ownership, and then get angry when the Māori would continue harvesting tuna/eels or birds on "their" land that they'd "purchased".
I am not sure what you mean by "Eurocentric" here. These distinctions exist in most Asian languages and probably in other continental landmasses.
Peoples living on remote oceanic islands are the exception rather than the rule, and lost the words for larger freshwater bodies because they didn't tend to encounter them, just as some inland peoples had no words for oceans. You've even mentioned a distinction... "brackish". It is pretty important to know if one can drink water or not.
By the way, in some parts of Europe these distinctions don't quite happen either. "Loch" is used for branches of the sea as much as freshwater. In some places "lake" and "lago" are used for both. In fact, without looking it up, "lagoon" is probably related to the Romance word for "lake". River isn't reserved for freshwater in European languages. The Menai Straits are Afon Menai (Menai River) in Welsh. In tradition, the ocean was described as a river encircling the continents.
"Which makes sense right?"
Most of them do, except waitapu. Taboos often make little sense, and the reasons can be long forgotten. Sometimes they are just dangerous stretches of water. We used to have notions of taboo here too.
You can see the same with the word "sea". Its German equivalent See still mainly means "lake", even though in some fixed expressions it can be translated as "sea" (e.g. Nordsee, Ostsee).
I read your post, and it got me thinking because, round here in Cheshire,v'mere' is a very common name for a bigger stretch of water ('pool' is generally reserved for smaller stretches of water).
So I did a quick search to check, both from memory and by looking at the map – not because I doubted you being right in general across the UK, but because locally 'mere' is so common.
Anyway, towns or bodies of water with 'Mere' in Cheshire: Mere, Mere Heath, Ellesmere Port, Blakemere, Delamere, Oakmere, Tatton Mere, Comber Mere, Pickmere, Manley Mere, Shakerly Mere, Marbury (means 'Fortified town by the lake'), Marbury Big Mere, the Quoisley Meres, Flaxmere, Hatchmere, Radnor Mere, Astbury Mere, Rossmere, Rostherne Mere, Nunsmere, The Mere, Little Mere… and then I got bored, so I may have missed a couple. Anyway, that's at least 23, and Cheshire is not a noticeably watery place, compared to some other counties.
In contrast, there are very few lakes: I could find Oulton Park Lake (man-made in the late 18th Century), and Acre Nook Lake, Lapwing Hall Lake, and another unnamed one – a series of quarry pits turned into a watersports centre in the 2010s.
So it looks like that in Cheshire at least, the normal name for a 'larger than a pond' body of water or nearby town is 'mere'.
Thanks for sending me down this interesting (well, to me, anyway) rabbit hole…
As a Dutch person, we were taught German in secondary school and Meer/See were the textbook example of false friends:
het meer - der See - the lake
de zee - das Meer - the sea
I don't remember being taught "die See" but I also dropped my German course after one year (which I now regret). Anyway, I always thought this was an interesting development in our languages.
"die See" refers to the sea in general, not to a specific body of water, unless it is part of a name, like "Nordsee".
The English word "sea" is also sometimes used in this sense, but it's less apparent since "the" carries no gender: "He liked living close to the sea." - doesn't really refer to a specific sea or ocean even though the definite article has been used. (I'm happy to be corrected if this is an ungrammatical sentence since I'm not a native English speaker)
Yeah, my mother tongue is similar, "sea" and "ocean" has the exact same word, so of course when I speak English I accidentally call a bunch of seas for oceans instead.
This is a well-established field where you can read experts discussing the word in depth, including its derivational properties and ablaut behavior. This isn't something where an HN's armchair guess is worth anything, just like when laypeople use HN threads on quantum theory for their own inane ideas.
Carl Darling Buck (A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages) and Julius Pokorny (Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch) are just a few of the philologists who have posited this "dead water" hypothesis
In many of the daughter languages it does regularly include saltwater connected to the world ocean (certainly the Latin "Mare Nostrum" for the Mediterranean!); it just seems uncertain from this description whether it necessarily had that sense in PIE.
That doesn't seem like "had no ... word for ... 'sea'" is a very clear or helpful description of the situation, though.
That doesn't mean no word for sea. It means sea refers to any large body of water that you dnn't see the other side of, like in some (all?) other language families. There is no discernible distinction from the perspective of the ancient observer. The Great Lakes look like oceans. Saltiness isn't of great relevance since there are salt lakes, too.
After growing up for decades in Michigan and seeing the surrounding Great Lakes regularly, the oceans were a bit disappointing. Besides the salt. I knew it was salty but I wasn't expecting pickle juice.
There was one major distinction, which was "is it drinkable?" Someone crossing the North American Great Lakes (before pollution), didn't need to store water. But they would crossing an ocean, or the Caspian Sea. It's not like you can use seawater to irrigate most crops (except seaweed and a handful of others).
"Mere" in English doesn't seem to refer to saltwater at all. Nearly always small lakes and mostly in certain locales of eastern England.
For an analogous but completely unrelated example, Stoney [0] has a word for "ocean" (mînîtâga) [1], but it's also only spoken in a landlocked region. So maybe human languages have a tendency to preserve/invent the word for "ocean" for some reason?
(I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
Finnish language doesn't have an actual word for "ocean". We use "valtameri", which means something like main sea or great sea. And both "valta" and "meri" are Indo-European loans.
But in Livonian (an almost extinct Finnic language spoken in Latvia), Valdamer is one of the names for the Baltic Sea. So maybe that's the origin of the Finnish term as well.
It is perhaps a blessing that the climate of the Papua lowlands makes the potato impossible to grow. While the potato would grow in the cooler highlands, this village to village transmission mechanism would not get the potato past the hot lowlands where plants would rot in the ground. The potato yields a lot more calories per hectare than the sweet potato, and when introduced to New Zealand, fueled massive wars.
Its probably true of most animals. I raised a couple of pigs and we intentionally never fed them any meat, even though they'd probably eat it, because we didnt want them to get a taste for it
> You don't want to be the farmer who falls over in his pig sty.
This is the real reason for the panic when Dorothy falls into the pig sty at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. The pigs would crush her and eat her. (But in the movie, her dress doesn't even get dirty!)
Apparently it's still a thing in places like rural India for people to squat to poop out in the fields, and then risk being bowled over by a pig rushing over to eat it.
They truly will eat anything.
As far as meat goes, they are not just scavengers - I've seen videos of wild pigs chasing after rabbits, actively hunting them down.
I'd never head of those Chinese "pig toilets", but it reminds me of a Chinese friend who said that growing up (maybe still?) it was common practice in the villages to feed infant poop to the pet/village dogs.
Horses are clearly and very much into the whole cowboy thing, they LIKE chasing down cows and catching them, some do it all by themseves and catch cows by grabbing there tails and hauling them around that way.
Horses are panoptic motherfuckers and are startlingly good stalkers, which I learned living in close quarters with a horse needing to chase them away while doing stuff in the padock, but have them reapear, it took very precise sneeky peeking to catch them moving towards me, as they only move when I am not looking, which led me to the only viable deterance, which is to pretend that they are invisible/of zero importance
which un nerves them, but so much as one eyelash of a look at them is taken as an invitation to partisipate, fuckers.
Horses also work well with dogs, and for arabians in Arabia, dates and dried fish were used as feed for both.
note, live with an arab/percheron cross far enough out that there is a wide representation of wild critters, and most everything is on most everythings menue, depending.
And one of my more radicle, radicle friends would say, "we will eat the vegans first, they are slow and weak", refering to what to do durring an opocaliptic event, and until they could get out to my place in the country.
I wouldn't characterise it as 'undercover cop...' but perhaps it might be fairer to say that until it's tested in court, no-one knows, so they (Amazon etc) are taking the 'safe' path of destroying the books?
Well, trying anything in court is definitely what they want to avoid. I mean, what is your suggestion here - should they buy the book, scan it, then sell or give it to someone else? That IS a copyright violation in itself, no need to try anything in court.
Whether or not AI training or replication of the text through the model is a copyright violation, is a whole different but unrelated question.
I don’t think it’s a sure thing that training a model on a work is considered a duplication in the sense that ripping a CD might be for example - unless I’ve missed something, that’s what hasn’t been decided in court.
I think they see destroying the book as the safest course of action for them.
Yes, and I imagine that’s why - in the minds of their lawyers - doing anything with the book (other than destroying it) is arguably less safe than destroying it
About 15% of the UK's land parcels are not in any land registry database, because recording there only became compulsory in 1990, so if an event like a sale/morgtage didn't happen to a property since then, it might not be registered. Regardless of the land registry, the ownership can still easily be proven.
No, it is mori, attested in marine, muir, maryadah, mal, morje, etc in farflung IE tongues today.
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