--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Joao S. Lopes" <josimo70@...> wrote:
>
> In Brazil there is some Tupi (Amerindian) redundant hydronyms and
> toponyms, like River Iguassu, "big water". But I didnt question the
> redundance, just the meaning, why to call a river "Liquid"?
I don't believe it would require too much semantic drift for a word
originally meaning "liquid" to become "water" in some daughter
language (or perhaps the drift might have gone the other way- a word
originally meaning "water" may have undergone sufficient shifts in
meaning in various daughter languages that modern scholars might
erroneously reconstruct the original meaning as "liguid".)
Ned Smith