Hi!

While learning Japanese, I came to realise that to the Japanese, mountains and forests were virtually synonymous, to such an extent that a name like YAMA-HA (I use a dash merely to show where one word ends and the other begins) actually means MOUNTAIN-LEAF, seemingly odd, but of course the Japanese just read FOREST-LEAF for MOUNTAIN-LEAF.

I initially thought that this phenomenon was peculiar to Japan - with its extreme lack of space, all forests not on mountains would no doubt have been cleared long ago and turned into arable land.

However, I've just found out the the word gorá, mountain in Russian, actually means forest/wood in Bulgarian.

So, has anyone noticed a similar phenomenon in the Scandinavian languages, please?

Cheers,

Simon