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It seems that either the naming of, or at least the use of the name of lakes does not follow any rule of which comes first, the name of the lake, or the designation, lake. Here in western NY there are several prime examples. The Great Lakes are all called by the designation "lake" followed by the name. (Lake Ontario) On the other hand the Finger Lakes are just the opposite. (Seneca Lake) This is not a function of the size of the lake, we also have Lake Placid and Lake Champlain, neither of which is of any great size.
I've always wondered about that too. Just east of where I live is a mountain named Gavilan Peak. Up north in Flagstaff we have the highest point in Arizona ... known as either Mt. Humphreys or Humphreys Peak (depending on which map you're using). Same with lakes. Lake Pleasant is just west of here, and Bartlett Lake is to the east. And they're comparable in size. I've always thought it was just a matter of history, and what the "discoverer" decided to call it.
Strange though, that there is no River Arizona, or River Whatever. Likewise with Oceans and Seas. My guess is that it has to do with established nautical conventions, and the fact that seafarers were the first real explorers. Lakes and mountains were the domain of land explorers.
My two cents, anyway.
This just in ... I guess there was a biblical reference to the Sea of Galilee, so perhaps there are exceptions. Wiki says these days it's officially known as Lake Tiberias.
I"m sure I"ve heard "River Jordan", "River Nile", "River Thames" and "River Platt" at least as often as the other way round, and then there"s the "Rio Grande" (we have one like that near us too, Heimhenge: the "Salt River" is also the "Rio Salado").
What would be interesting is to see if there"s any clear bias for oxymoronic names, like "Canyon Hill" (33 02"33"N, 108 27"44"W); is it a hill discovered by an early explorer named Canyon, or a canyon named in honor of some historical Mr Hill? (And there"s a "Hill Canyon" — 33 01"38"N, 108 08"05"W — about twenty miles east of it, just to keep things interesting.)
Edit: note to anyone trying to cut and paste those coordinates into a mapping utility. Try as I might, the "minutes" mark keeps getting changed to "seconds" when I save the post.
Yeah, I've been noticing that single/double quotation mark glitch too. Seems to have started when Grant revised the forum a month or so ago. I've been thinking about emailing him, but figured he must be aware of the problem. Given the purpose of this forum, you'd think having the punctuation work properly would be a high priority. GRANT? PLEASE FIX!
Back on topic ... Ron, you are correct about River Jordan etc. Googling "River Nile" got 2 million hits, whereas "Nile River" got 4.6 million. So I guess there's inconsistencies with rivers as well.
I don't speak Spanish well enough to know for sure, but is it a characteristic of the language to put the "Rio" first? I visually scanned a map of Mexico and didn't find any rivers named "Something Rio." The "Rio" seems to always come first.
Curiously, in the naming of lunar features, there is a reversal of the terrestrial convention. For example, Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) and Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms). Maybe, as with Spanish, that's just the way names are constructed in Latin? I'm guessing there too, as I speak even less Latin than I do Spanish.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that putting the type of feature first and then its name is a feature of Romance languages in general. Not only do we have "Rio Grande" but also "Calle San Martin", "Monte Negro", "Rue St Germain", "Mont Blanc" (and "Montreal") and so on. That would cover Latin as well.
To add to the evidence of mixed mountains in English, Mount Pilot of Andy-Griffith fame is actually called Pilot Mountain, and so is the town next to it. But there's Mount Lemon in the mountains above Tucson, and I-81 goes through Big Walker Mountain in VA.
I just got some feedback from an ex-student who has an advanced degree in classical languages. Bob's response is close, but according to my source, even Latin suffers from this ambiguity. Here's the "expert's" response ...
Thanks for the question. I too have wondered about the same phenomenon in English. In Latin, at least, it seems that one may refer to mountains, rivers, and seas in either order. Examples:
Mons Olympus OR Olympus Mons for Mount Olympus
Flumen Rhodanum OR Rhodanum Flumen for the Rhone River
Mare Tyrrhenum OR Tyrrhenum Mare for the Tyrrhenian Sea
You'll notice that Latin can do it either way for seas; however, putting mare "sea" first is much more common. Thus in Latin, at least, there is no difference in the way Earth seas and Moon seas are named: Mare Adriaticum, Mare Imbrium. I do not know why English only uses the "sea-last" technique for sea names on Earth, but I can tell you why "sea" comes first in the English Moon sea names: all of the seas on the Moon (at least the ones I know of) in Latin consist of the word mare followed by another Latin noun in the genitive case, which must be translated "of (noun)." This is quite unlike Earth sea names in Latin, in which both words are usually the same case.
Mare Mediterraneanum would be "Mediterranean Sea" in Latin, but that term wasn't used until late antiquity. In my experience, the ancients (Greeks and Romans) generally referred to the Mediterranean as just "the sea" (mare in Latin, thalassa in Greek).
So it looks like we're stuck with that arbitrary word order for geographic features. No rhyme or reason, as is the case for so many features of our language. This was an interesting thread. Thank you all for your insights. Great starting question by CBG.
As far as the terrestrial vs. lunar naming conventions go, it might well have to do with the fact that many lunar features were named by Jesuit astronomers, all of which were undoubtedly Latin scholars as well.
To illumine a different facet of the gems above, I think that the quality of English to have prepositive adjectives plays into this. English primarily has prepositive adjectives: adjectives precede the noun they modify. Latin and the Romance languages primarily have postpositive adjectives: adjectives follow the noun they modify.
Of course, English, French, and Spanish have exceptions to the rule. The example of mount is one such notable exception where the name follows the word mount. Not so with mountain or peak which take prepositive adjectives. Notwithstanding the exceptions, each language has its rule.
So you have …
English: The green vase
But …
French: Le vase vert
Spanish: El florero verde
Italian: Il vaso verde
Portuguese: O vaso verde
Romanian: Vaza verde
And other Germanic languages …
German: Die grüne Vase
Dutch: De groene vaas
Icelandic: Græna vasi
Norwegian: Den gronne vasen
Swedish: Den gröna vas
While in classical Latin, a highly inflected language, the word order was extremely flexible, there was a growing tendency to place the adjective after the noun in the unmarked word order.
When a geographic name is constructed natively in English, it is very likely to have the noun at the end. Translations could have a greater tendency to preserve the original word order when possible. The English names of the Great Lakes are likely influenced by the French names, since the French were the first European explorers of the region: Huron (Lac Huron) in 1615, by Le Caron, the Recollect friar, and by Champlain, one of the greatest navigators in New France; Ontario, (Lac Ontario) during the same year, by Champlain; Superior, (Lac Supérieur) about 1629, by Etienne Brule; Michigan, (Lac Michigan) in 1634, by Jean Nicolet; Erie, (Lac Érié) probably by Joliet, in 1669.
On the topic of lunar features and their translations, something else is at play. Consider these lunar features, the majority being genitive noun constructions:
(unmarked=genitive noun; *=adjective; **=participle; ***=proper-name adjective; ****=proper-name genitive)
Mare Anguis – Serpent Sea
Mare Australe – *Southern Sea
Mare Cognitum – **Sea that has become known
Mare Crisium – Sea of Crises
Mare Fecunditatis – Sea of Fecundity
Mare Frigoris – Sea of Cold
Mare Humboldtianum – ***Humboldt's Sea
Mare Humorum – Sea of Moisture
Mare Imbrium – Sea of Showers
Mare Ingenii – Sea of Cleverness
Mare Insularum – Sea of Islands
Mare Marginis – Sea of the Edge
Mare Moscoviense – ***Sea of Muscovy
Mare Nectaris – Sea of Nectar
Mare Nubium – Sea of Clouds
Mare Orientale – *Eastern sea
Oceanus Procellarum – Ocean of Storms
Mare Serenitatis – Sea of Serenity
Mare Smythii – ****Smyth's Sea
Mare Spumans – **Foaming Sea
Mare Tranquillitatis – Sea of Tranquility
Mare Undarum – Sea of Waves
Mare Vaporum – Sea of Vapors
By and large, the genitive constructions are conservatively translated into English by noun of noun, with the exception of the Serpent Sea, a looser translation that seems quite suitable. I would reject the conservative *Sea of Serpent or *Serpent's Sea.
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For some really hardcore reading check these out:
U.S. Board on Geographic Names
USBGN Domestic Names – Principles, Policies, and Procedures
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: NGA GEOnet Names Server (includes approximately 4800 undersea features!!)
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) Naming
International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) Moon features
Noting that Latin declension makes the word order of such terms somewhat arbitrary, it's interesting that the present-day Romance languages opted almost invariably for putting the adjective last, and that astronomers assigning more recent Latin names to features inherit the same tendency.
Back in English, we have the fanciful locales in the movie "Yellow Submarine", as the Beatles and their guide make their way progressively through the Sea of Time, the Sea of Science, the Sea of Monsters, the Sea of Nothing, the Sea of Holes and finally the Sea of Green. That last one is forced by the phrase "sea of green" in the movie's title song, but the others all follow the lunar pattern, though one of the group makes a pun that the Sea of Holes could also be the Holy Sea ("Holy See" being another name for the Vatican). (I think the Sea of Monsters is also referred back to as the Monstrous Sea later in the picture.)
I've been whimsically interested, upon occasion, by the way we string such names together in longer sequences. In Raleigh there was a place called Mount Hope, I suppose, and then the church there was Mt Hope Church, but now there is only Mt Hope Church Road. I've already mentioned the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel in Virginia. I sometimes imagine Molly Creek flowing under the Molly Creek Bridge, which becomes the namesake for a town named Molly Creek Bridge Junction, and a Baptist church there naming itself Molly Creek Bridge Junction Church, on and on.
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