Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?(ivanludvig.dev) |
Do Lake Names Reflect Their Properties?(ivanludvig.dev) |
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 "demarcated" or "dedicated" (in modern Finnish the verb pyhittää means "to sanctify" but also "to devote" or "to dedicate"). So many of these waterbodies may have been named after ancient border or boundary agreements of some sort, pertaining to fishing or hunting rights for example. Rather mundane stuff despite the word's contemporary meaning!
I'd say it's descriptive.
For example, a lake might be blue when viewed from space, but the locals can still call it a "Black Lake" because it's surrounded by mountains made of dark rocks, and when you stand at its shore you can typically see them reflected in its surface, giving an overall impression of a black color.
> I fetched the satellite image tile for the zoomed-in region of each lake center and read a single pixel at the center of the tile, which should give us an idea of the lake’s color
Indeed, this story is a very good example of that in the academic world (Economics): https://nitter.poast.org/andreloez/status/181747110580160124...
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".
https://www.scenichudson.org/explore-the-valley/outdoor-adve...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jack+the+Horse+Lake/@47.61...
However, Mud Lake definitely lived up to its name.
Many of them don’t have meanings and I’m not sure what they mean to further analyse like you did.
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.
Bob Dylan ranks it as his favorite Prine song.
(a Norm Macdonald joke, RIP.)
To be honest, just picking a random pixel would have been fine, too, anything else is an overkill.
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?