Languages develop rich vocabularies when they are needed. The United Kingdom is defined by water,
either in standing bodies around and in it or coming from the skies above it or
rising from the earth below it. As a consequence of this state of wetness as well
a propensity for going to distant foreign lands, the English language has an
incredible number of words describing bodies of water, flowing or standing.
One criterium distinguishing the terms is size. Going upwards, a rivulet
is small indeed, rare to see and almost ignorable as is rill or streamlet. A brook being a tad bigger and more
conspicuous. Getting wider, a stream or creek or in some places in
the northern UK a burn will definitely get your shoes wet unless you
jump over it and probably has some small fish. At some point, the water volume
increases and becomes a river, a powerful current that requires swimming
to cross. By the way, the legendary (for Christians) “mighty Jordan River” is more
like a stream than a river but everything is a bit exaggerated in the Middle
East.
For standing bodies of water, nature creates puddles, which are tempory and longer term water holes, which
are okay for finding drinking water but not much more than that. With better
conditions, it can be a pond, a nice place to go on a hot summer’s day.
When the ideal land and water combine, a lake is formed, filled with
fish and boats. Regarding holy overselling, the Sea of Galilee, otherwise known
as the Kinneret, is actually a lake. Once you can no longer see the other side,
it becomes a sea, deep and dangerous. Finally, the largest bodies of
water are oceans, impressive by all criteria.
Alas, this basic vocabulary only just scratches the services as bodies
of water are defined by their environment and their function in it. Rivers can
be tributaries or distributaries, depending on whether they feed into
or from the main river. They can be rapids, with clean and white water,
or deltas, slow and muddy. They can flow once when it rains, as a wadi,
or have a constant flow of organic material, as a bayou, a word used in
the U.S. South. Human beings can create trenches or runnels to
allow water to flow in a field.
Likewise, a water hole with man-made improved access for drinking water
is a well or, on a larger scale, a reservoir. Flat land areas
that are periodically covered with water are called tidal zones or flood
plains, depending on the frequency and cause of the invading water. You can
find a channel between two large bodies of land. A lagoon is cut
off from the adjacent body of water while an estuary is connected. The
Scots would call either a loch but theirs are colder and deeper. Marshes
has a lower level of water and grasses while swamps have deeper water
and trees. Together they are called wetlands.
English and water or inexorably connected as any conversation in London
will remind you. This intimacy requires a rich pool of words to describe its
nuances. The physical environment does have a huge impact on language. To
massacre that famous Dean Martin song, “let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.”
