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Meaning: river

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Hans-Jörg Bibiko edited this page Mar 13, 2020 · 4 revisions

Illustrative Context

He lives beside the river.

Target Sense

  • The most generic term for a river in the following prototypical sense: a naturally occurring watercourse (i.e. not an artificial canal), prototypically of fresh water, flowing through the landscape (prototypically above ground, not underground), progressively from higher to lower elevations, and usually ending in a lake, the sea, or joining an even larger river.

  • The target scale should be the prototypical intermediate-to-large scale of English river. Certainly, avoid terms equivalent to English stream that denote something explicitly smaller in scale than the prototypical river. So likewise, the French term is not ruisseau, but rivière; in German not Bach, but Fluss.

  • As a guideline, the lexeme selected must be applicable to a prototypical river wide and deep enough that it cannot be trivially jumped over, but must be at least waded across, more usually swum across, or indeed may be so wide, deep or dangerous enough that swimming right across it would be an intimidating challenge to most people.

  • In many languages the default term will be applicable across a wide range of scales and types of ‘river’ (according to local geographical conditions). As noted, however, avoid any terms that specifically denote relatively small scale (e.g. stream).

  • The basic river term in most languages is applicable all the way up to the largest rivers in the world. French, however, is relatively unusual in having a separate lexeme specific to rivers of especially large scale: fleuve. This is thus necessarily a narrower, less default term than rivière, which therefore remains the correct lexeme for IE-CoR ‘river’. (Fleuve is not to be selected for French.)

  • Avoid any terms that are narrower also in referring to any particular type of river in any other sense: e.g. torrent, tributary, Spanish arroyo.

  • The default term should normally be applicable to an actual specific river, and should not be a more abstract or technical terms such as watercourse.

  • Avoid any narrower terms that focus on particular characteristics of a river, and/or figurative senses: e.g. extensions to senses of flowing or time (river of life), swiftness, tears, etc..

  • (Compare with the similar approach to considerations of prototypical size in the separate IE-CoR meanings lake, forest, bird and leaf.)

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