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Ethnogenesis in a place full of lakes, much?
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?
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