I find that the English language has lots of different words for waterways. It can be difficult to define the exact boundaries of edge cases. We have:
River
Stream
Brook
Creek
Burn
Sometimes these have different meanings in different places; for instance, in the Southeast Coastal US, “creek” means specifically a brackish waterway in a salt marsh, whereas in most of the rest of the US, it is essentially a synonym for brook or stream.
Where climate comes into this is that there is a whole different set of terms in arid climates, viz.,
Wash
Gulch
Coulee
Arroyo (loan word from Spanish)
How do you tell an arroyo from a coulee? I haven’t a clue.
Having grown up on the coast, I was used to the flags for different wind conditions: one red pennant for “Small Craft Advisory,” two red pennants for “Gale Warning,” and so on. I remember hunkering down in a U-Haul out on the Great Plains, the wind howling so hard it rocked the truck, and thinking, “gale warning” – and then stopping to wonder if that term is even used inland.
In any case, the Beaufort scale does have names for the different wind speeds:
Oh it’s even funnier in the UK.
For example: Avon River is literally - River River because Avon means River.
I’m sure that happens elsewhere, but yeah, English speakers liked to mess up language >_<
I live in the SE (alabama), and no one I know (including born-and-raised-here folk) uses “creek” to mean brackish waterway in salt marsh though, it’s just used exactly how we would use brook up north. It’s gonna be smaller than a stream though.
Here most “old” places like lakes and rivers have names from different language groups (before and around year 1000 there were baltic groups, then there were finno-ugric groups, then they lived with vyatichi or different slavic groups, then history is quite complicated in the last two centuries), so hydronims are usually a thousand+ y. old and have word bases that mean or probably meant water, river, fast, slow, push etc., they’re of course change with so many years, but still names often mean “river river”.
Interestingly (and off topic) Finno-ugric and Basque are the two languages in Eurasia not based on Indo-European, an ancient language that forms the basis of most languages from India to Spain. From what I know it was a slow spread, rather than one group conquering everything!
My Scottish country dance teacher (Canadian) used the expression, “It goes like stink!” to describe a figure(s) that needed to be executed really fast. It sort of made sense in a dance hall situation .
In the Southwest U.S., what we call a river (or rio) often wouldn’t pass for a drainage ditch in the eastern U.S. Lots of rios here that are essentially arroyos (dry ditches). Even when they do have water it’s often so little that you can literally step across the river from one bank to the other without getting your feet wet. Some of our dry rios might have had some perennial flows in the past, but they were never more than what easterners would call creeks.
Even the Rio Grande is not a particularly “big river” by eastern standards. And, yeah, similar to the Avon River, it’s often called the Rio Grande River (big river river), especially in Texas, which drives me nuts.
I looked it up, and it’s derived from Finno-ugric. My understanding (and it is not large!) the Magyars migrated out of central Asia into the area that is now Hungary. Interestingly, their presence isolated the Balkan Slavs from the rest of Slavic Europe. I am by no means an expert on this stuff, but find the migrations of peoples quite fascinating. A lot of it took place over a thousand years ago. A Germanic people migrated into Spain, and central Asian ‘mounted peoples’ migrated all over the place.
@mamestraconfigurata and it’s really sad big chunk of those languages are lost or almost list through last half of a century, even in early XX century Leningrad oblast had many people speaking them in everyday life. Of course most of languages are still here and used which is great.
Or maybe it is how far south? ie are you Gulf Coast area? I do recall people calling them creeks down by the coast, (but I never realised there was a difference between that kind of creek -ie brackish - and any other creek, but i wasn’t down there long)
In the Dominican Republic, a gulch or seasonal waterway route is called a “caniada” (I wrote ni instead of n-tilde because I am keyboard incompetent), like “canyon” in English I suppose, but smaller.
it is common among cruising sailors to refer to “mangrove creeks” when describing narrow and sometime only tidally flowing (and thus not even brackish) narrow inlets in coastal mangrove forests. Mangrove creeks are prime locations to tie up with many long lines, if one is facing a hurricane or typhoon. Often boats will be lined up down the middle of a mangrove creek in a vast spiderweb of nylon. For years I hauled around over 1000 feet of 3/4-inch three-strand nylon rope as “storm insurance”.
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