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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Potamic reminds me of Mesopotamia, once the omost fertile
soil of ancient times, now plagued by salination. The news
mentioned "Marsh Arabs" content to live as their ancestors did, managing to survive genocide gesta of Saddam Hussein.
Also problem with Turks damming Euphrates (if I remember correctly.)
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veteran
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I never heard of this word, potamic. As I save the old messages, maybe I'll make time somewhen to go through and count the words I think I knew before they were sent out and those that were very new to me (lottuvem).
In the same vein, er ... a ... streambed ... as the question "What size collection of buildings and people minimally constitutes a city?" ....
I've always wondered "What is the difference between a creek and a river and a stream?"
I've seen some "rivers" that were tiny little things that you could nearly wade across at parts - but they're called rivers. Is it gallons/liters per minute that flow? Some other criteria?
Example: The Salt River, which is clearly what I'd call a river down near where it joins the Ohio, but say up near where it was damned up to make Taylorsville Lake it was just a trickle some summers.
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Re: now plagued by salination.
Salination of soil is an old problem.. early farmers switched from wheat to rye to barley as salt built up, since each is more salt tolerant (wheat is the least, rye is more, barley still more tolerant of salty soils.
wheat is also (generally) harder to grow. rye and barley can withstand cold and drought better than wheat. (the great plains of US were not great producers of wheat, until an influx of russian and other eastern and northern europeans brought 'winter wheat' (red wheat) which is sown in the fall, and lies, waiting under the snow for spring to germinate.
winter/red wheat is much harder wheat..(the endosperm, or starchy head has a greater quanity of complex protiens, like gluten) most european wheat is 'softer'
(corn(maize) has this same characterist, flint corn is more common in the north.. -flint as it name suggests, has a very hard kernal.)
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I've seen some "rivers" that were tiny little things that you could nearly wade across at parts - but they're called rivers. Is it gallons/liters per minute that flow? Some other criteria? ~ FF
I’ve always assumed that the continuous flow of water from source to sea (OK, it could be a lake or another river) would be named as, say, River Idunnowot, even though it became narrower as you moved upstream. But probably this only happened if the mouth was found and named first and exploration moved upstream from there. In many cases rivers were discovered and named in sections or by local communities, and the connection between the sections was only discovered later. In that case the same river would have a number of names along its length. Lesser flows that join it are tributaries but may themselves be rivers if they warrant being called a river at their downstream end. There seems to be no particular standard by which you could say what is a river and what is a stream. It has been a subjective decision and, for example, some UK rivers might never have achieved that status in other, larger countries.
A creek, by the way, holds a different meaning in the UK from that used in the US. This from MW:
Main Entry: creek
Pronunciation: 'krEk, 'krik
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English crike, creke, from Old Norse -kriki bend
Date: 13th century
1 chiefly British : a small inlet or bay narrower and extending farther inland than a cove
2 : a natural stream of water normally smaller than and often tributary to a river
3 archaic : a narrow or winding passage
- up the creek : in a difficult or perplexing situation
In looking for some distinction between rivers and streams I found a passage with two words new to me:
“Slow-moving lotic ecosystems are very similar to those of lentic environments in terms of aquatic plant and animal life.”
For what it's worth, here is MW again:
Main Entry: lo·tic
Pronunciation: 'lO-tik
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin lotus, past participle of lavere
Date: 1916
: of, relating to, or living in actively moving water <a lotic habitat>
Main Entry: len·tic
Pronunciation: 'len-tik
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin lentus sluggish
Date: circa 1938
: of, relating to, or living in still waters (as lakes, ponds, or swamps)
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veteran
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Very interesting. Two very useful words (maybe good scrabble words, too).
k
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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re:What is a river?...Is it gallons/liters per minute that flow? Some other criteria?
the old geography book defination of a river was a body of water that existed year round, that had a head (or starting place) and mouth that fed in to a sea, a gulf or ocean, or that joined with another body, that fed into a sea, gulf or ocean.
it is not required that a river be navigatable--but it must be a year round flow of water (so some 'rivers' in australia might not make the geography book cut) and it had to flow out to sea, gulf or ocean (so the genoese river in NY might not make the cut, since it empties into lake ontario.--but since the great lakes all feed each other, and feed into the StLawrence river.. (if you count that way, the st lawrence has got to be the 4th largest river in the world, (if not bigger!)
there are plenty of non-river rivers (NYC has 2!, the Harlem 'river' and the East 'river'- neither of which are rivers. i think creeks and streams, and so on, all feed rivers. i don't know why some get to be rivers in their own right.. (size? the ohio river is pretty big.. as is the missouri..these branches of the Mississippi get to be rivers.
and technically the conneticut river feeds into long island sound (not on the list (sea, gulf, ocean) but it other wise has all the characteristics..i think the head waters are in canada!and its deep and somewhat navigable (well up to the first falls)
i once drove cross country, and after the hudson, the only river that made an impression was the mississippi.. and we crossed it way up north in indiana!
Long island has some pretty poor excuses for rivers.. Wading River (the name says it all!) is not much of a river!
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journeyman
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journeyman
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What about brook, rill etc. Are they simply synonyms (of what? river, stream, creek??) or separate, definable entities?
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Not very rigorously defined, but here's what http://geography.unk.edu/corps/lessondraft/class2.html had to say... Brook – a natural stream of running water smaller than a river or a creek. Creek – a natural stream of running water larger than a brook and smaller than a river. River – a large stream of water of natural origin, which drains an area of land and flows into another river of body of water. Stream – a flow of moving water usually of natural origin.
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veteran
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Ah, that makes sense...that that one can have the ZYX River that is not a river in the same way that one can have CBA City which is not a city.
k
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Where there is a potamus, riparian rights become a source of intome for lawyers.
riparian
adj.
5< L riparius < ripa, river bank < IE *reipa, steep edge < base *rei3, to slit, cut > RIVE, REAP6
1 of, adjacent to, or living on, the bank of a river or, sometimes, of a lake, pond, etc.
2 designating any right enjoyed by the owner of riparian land
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Commonly used in the US South: branch, as in bourbon and branch water.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Two very useful words (maybe good scrabble words, too)
Good words indeed, but not good Scrabble words unless they've somehow made it into the Official Certified Scrabble Dictionary. (One of my pet peeves about high-level Scrabble.)
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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The definitions of rivers, creeks, streams, waters, and all of those good terms have typically been very much in the hands of the namers. In Zild, there are some astonishingly badly misnamed watercourses: Rivers which are creeks, creeks which are rivers and what have you. As a personal aside, an ancestor of mine was the Surveyor-General for Otago, and later New Zealand, in the mid to late 1800s. He named perhaps 60% of the rivers, creeks and streams in Otago, an area about the size of South Carolina or West Virginia. He used the words river, stream, creek and what have you with some regard to size. He also went to considerable trouble to find out what the Maori names of the waterways were. In an area called the Maniototo, he named all of the creeks and streams using the Maori nomenclature. However, the Provincial Council (the provinces were self-governing within a federal system at the time) decided it couldn't pronounce the names and told him to go away and rename them to something more "useable". So he named them at a level he believed commensurate with the mental and linguistic abilities of the councillors (some of whom were also my ancestors). Yep, he named them Hogburn, Eweburn, Horseburn, Cowburn, Idaburn, Gimmerburn, Wedderburn, Pigroot Creek, Dog Creek, etc. Later on some of them were renamed to their Maori equivalents, so now we have the Manuherikia River and the Taieri River, for instance.
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