Why the confusion between 'sea' and 'lake' in Germanic languages?

Ethnogenesis in a place full of lakes, much? :confused:

In the Romance and Slavic languages, the word for the sea comes from MARE/MORE. And all Romance languages and Slavic languages have a common word for lake.

But in the Germanic languages:

In English, mere meant both sea and lake, but nowadays only a type of lake. They prefer sea, which in Old English could also be a lake. And they forgot about haeff.
In Dutch, they did pretty much as in English, using zee for the sea, but kept meer for the lake.
In German they chose the other way round, logical as they are. So Meer is for the sea and See for lakes... but only in the masculine. If you use the femenine, See is also sea. Yeah, perhaps not that logical.
And in the Nordic ones, they thought that the one Southerners didn't use was cooler, so they use hav for the sea. And use the s(j)ö for lakes instead.

Why the confusion? People who know well the geography there, any ideas?

I'm not quite sure of why the shift in Germanic languages. I've recently found out that Old English speakers occasionally used the word flōd to refer to standing bodies of water as well. Cognates with Old Saxon flōd, Old Dutch fluot (Dutch vloed), Old High German fluot (German Flut), Old Norse flóð (Icelandic flóð).

In the case of English it must be a Norman/Anglo-Saxon thing which often was a class and education distinction with the lower-classes using the Anglo-Saxon and the upper-classes (educated in French and Latin and influenced by Norman) using the romance.

I would assume Dutch has a similar influence due to its proximity to French with the border area being a mini-Sprachbund. Today's language border is obviously a continuation of the former Roman Empire-"Barbarian" border running along an almost identitical geographic line

http://www.worldology.com/Europe/images/rise_rome.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._Countries.png

The reason for that confusion is certainly that in the proto-Germanic Urheimat, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, there is no clear distinction between sea and lakes. Along the coast of Eastern Sweden, you never know if you're in the middle of a landscape with plenty of lakes, or in an archipelago. The Baltic Sea's salinity is low, and very low along the coasts (you can catch herrings as well as pikes at the same spots). Immense lakes like Vänern and Vättern are sjöar just like the Baltic Sea (Östersjön), they cannot be visually distinguished.

Significantly, in Stockholm, the part of the Baltic sea that extends into the city is called Saltsjön (actually not much salty) just to make clear this is not just another freshwater lake.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Comte Arnau

in the Nordic ones, they use hav for the sea. And use the s(j)ö for lakes instead.

Why the confusion? People who know well the geography there, any ideas?

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The confusion doesn't stop there. In Scandinavia, hav more or less matches ocean, but German Haff is used for the coastal semi-freshwater lagoons of the Baltic area! (Stettiner Haff, Kurische Haff etc.).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Comte Arnau

In German they chose the other way round, logical as they are. So Meer is for the sea and See for lakes... but only in the masculine. If you use the femenine, See is also sea.

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BTW, in French (as well as in Occitan and Rhaeto-Romance dialects), mer (of Latin origin) is always feminine, unlike in Spanish and Italian. But the Germanic cognate of mer has given mare (just a small pond), marais (marsh) and marécage (swamp).

Oops, I should have added the following:

• During the last Ice Age (-10,000) the Baltic Sea was a glacial lake filled with ice. Then, when climate went milder, it became a freshwater lake whose emissary was a potent river flowing through the Swedish lowlands of Svealand and the great lakes regions (from Mälardalen — the Mälarens Valley — to the Göta Älv valley), i.e. roughly between Stockholm and Göteborg. Meanwhile, due to isostatic rebound, the Scandinavian peninsula got steadily higher, whilst the oceanic level did the same with continental ice caps melting. So, at some point, the Baltic sea ceased to be a lake and became level with the North Sea, the connection being from then on through the Danish sounds and belts.

Some people witnessed that change — possibly proto-Germanics, or pre-Germanic tribes who passed that tradition to Germanic settlers. They had seen a big lake becoming a real sea. Hence the confusion.

Now in Stockholm, the difference in elevation between the Mälar lake and the sea is only 80 cm. But about 1,000 years ago, in the Middle Ages, there was no difference, the lake was just a Baltic gulf reaching deep into the country. No wonder that from the beginning, the Germanic had very blurred ideas of what a lake and a sea were.

^ Definitely interesting. Languages certainly reveal more about our ethnic history than it seems at first.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Comte Arnau

In Dutch, they did pretty much as in English, using zee for the sea, but kept meer for the lake.
In German they chose the other way round, logical as they are. So Meer is for the sea and See for lakes...

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BTW it's just occurring to me: in Eastern France, the Lorrain lakes in the Vosges mountains are all called -mer (Gérardmer, Retournemer, Longemer etc.), despite the Germanic language border being quite close (the lake of Gérardmer is called in Alsatian Gerdsee).

Which confirms once more that the Germanic (i.e. Frankish) component of France was more Dutch than German.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Remiremont.jpg

http://images-01.delcampe-static.net...17/969_001.jpg