So in "Paskalampi" and "Vesijärvi", which part of it means "lake"? Naively (I have obviously no clue about finnish), I would have expected some syllables (or token in modern LLM terminology) to occur in both names (i.e. representing the "lake" part).
Well, here in Massachusetts we have Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, which doesn't describe its color but does mean "lake divided by islands" and is a pretty accurate, if long winded, description of it.
Growing up I was told it actually meant something like "you fish over there, I fish over here, nobody fishes in the middle" and that is was some sort of territory boundary.
The color of a lake in satellite view depends on the satellite's viewing angle (which depends on the satellite's trajectory and the lake's location), the angle of the sun (which depends on the same things plus the time and date the image was taken), the weather, the satellite's sensors (false color is a thing), and how the images are processed before publishing. Overall I think it's almost impossible to estimate the "true" color of a lake from public satellite images, even if you used all pixels instead of just one.
Yeah I stopped taking this post seriously when I read this sentence:
> I fetched the satellite image tile for the zoomed-in region of each lake center and read a single pixel at the center of the tile, which should give us an idea of the lake’s color
Also, I think most usually the lake names come from the color they have when see from the ground, rather than from above.
For example, a lake might be blue when viewed from space, but the locals can still call it a "Black Lake" because it's surrounded by mountains made of dark rocks, and when you stand at its shore you can typically see them reflected in its surface, giving an overall impression of a black color.
Minnesota has several lakes named "Mud Lake," one of which I have spent considerable time around. The surrounding area is on top of a huge water table. It's normal for a house with a ~900 sq ft basement to have two(!) sump pumps, and for both of them to run daily(!). Before there was a housing development there, I imagine it would have been very, very muddy. The lake itself isn't particularly muddy, though.
On the Pacific Crest Trail, there is a lake called Gillette Lake presumably because it's the best a man can get. I, for one, quite liked it, as it's bright turquoise due to rock flour.
In the Grand Teton mountains, at 9,500 ft. (2,895 meters) elevation, there is a "Surprise Lake" at the top of the hiking trail, which is kind of surprising when you get there.
I was surprised to learn that, while the suburb of Silver Lake in LA is in fact named after the water reservoir at its centre, the reservoir itself is actually named after former water commissioner Herman Silver. The way its serene surface reflects the city and the mountains beyond? Just a coincidence.
There's also Särkijärvi, "roach lake" (as in the fish) nearby; presumably there is (or once was) a healthy roach population there.
The most common lake name in Finland is Pyhäjärvi, literally "holy lake" or "sacred lake", but apparently the original meaning of the word pyhä was something like "demarcated" or "dedicated" (in modern Finnish the verb pyhittää means "to sanctify" but also "to devote" or "to dedicate"). So many of these waterbodies may have been named after ancient border or boundary agreements of some sort, pertaining to fishing or hunting rights for example. Rather mundane stuff despite the word's contemporary meaning!
Salt? I don't know if there are any in finland tho.
Does finnish differentiate between fresh and sea water? If it's near the coast I imagine it could have been named thus to differentiate it from a nearby gulf?
"Vesi" means generically any kind of water and there are compound words for seawater and freshwater just like in English. There are several Vesijärvis in Finland, and now that I googled it, it's conjectured that the word vesi in the name does not refer to the water in the lake but rather derives from an archaic word meaning "outlet river".
Obviously this is just for fun, but I am a bit disturbed about similar projects that try to gain some meaningful insights out of vast public data sets without the slightest attention paid to the quality of the data used. It doesn’t matter how much processing you do or how clever your algorithms are if the underlaying data is inaccurate, out of date, inconsistent, non-normalized, incomplete, etc. No dataset is perfect, but at least take some time to address it.
> I am a bit disturbed about similar projects that try to gain some meaningful insights out of vast public data sets without the slightest attention paid to the quality of the data used.
When I was learning SCUBA, one of our sessions happened in Tea Lake (learning how to do an emergency swim ascent). I can vouch for its name accurately representing its properties.
Some lakes undergo drastic changes through the seasons. I know of a few that go from dark blue(late fall, early spring) to brown(spring runoff sediment) to dark green(algae in summer) in a single year.
We have a 'red lake' in Romania that is fairly recent (river dammed by an earthquake in 1838). It looks just muddy to me. It may have been red when it formed due to water with iron oxides or something.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 89.0 ms ] threadhttps://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=paskalampi#map=18...
Then again, at least this is more descriptive than the 13 called Vesijärvi, or "Water Lake".
However, Mud Lake definitely lived up to its name.
> I fetched the satellite image tile for the zoomed-in region of each lake center and read a single pixel at the center of the tile, which should give us an idea of the lake’s color
To be honest, just picking a random pixel would have been fine, too, anything else is an overkill.
For example, a lake might be blue when viewed from space, but the locals can still call it a "Black Lake" because it's surrounded by mountains made of dark rocks, and when you stand at its shore you can typically see them reflected in its surface, giving an overall impression of a black color.
https://www.scenichudson.org/explore-the-valley/outdoor-adve...
Bob Dylan ranks it as his favorite Prine song.
(a Norm Macdonald joke, RIP.)
There's also Särkijärvi, "roach lake" (as in the fish) nearby; presumably there is (or once was) a healthy roach population there.
The most common lake name in Finland is Pyhäjärvi, literally "holy lake" or "sacred lake", but apparently the original meaning of the word pyhä was something like "demarcated" or "dedicated" (in modern Finnish the verb pyhittää means "to sanctify" but also "to devote" or "to dedicate"). So many of these waterbodies may have been named after ancient border or boundary agreements of some sort, pertaining to fishing or hunting rights for example. Rather mundane stuff despite the word's contemporary meaning!
I'd say it's descriptive.
Does finnish differentiate between fresh and sea water? If it's near the coast I imagine it could have been named thus to differentiate it from a nearby gulf?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Jack+the+Horse+Lake/@47.61...
Indeed, this story is a very good example of that in the academic world (Economics): https://nitter.poast.org/andreloez/status/181747110580160124...
If there's more than one lake, you have to name it either after someone, by a feature it has that others don't, or by something nearby.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelimutu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lake_(Romania)
The spellings come from the anglicisation of
1. Sandy Lake and
2. Red Trout Lake
so the namers kept things simple in their native tongue but now the names are almost indecipherable.
That seems common enough.
Many of them don’t have meanings and I’m not sure what they mean to further analyse like you did.