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> Polynesian languages would distinguish between fresh water bodies and salt water ones Māori distinguished water _quality_ without reference to whether or not

> 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".

nephihaha 8d ago
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.

nephihaha 8d ago

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.