One man's brook is another man's allt. Or nant. Or gill. Or burn.
Found this really interesting.
A FEW YEARS AGO, THE climate adaptation researcher Ben Smith—then a Ph.D. student at Kings College London—was working on his dissertation, about the effectiveness of water restoration projects in the United Kingdom. As with most scholarly projects, this involved spending hours and hours with the same information.
“I’d been staring at lists of rivers… [for] far too much time,” he says, when certain patterns of terminology began emerging. While the northern U.K. was squiggled all over with “burns,” the southeast was instead full of “nants” and “afons.”
“I got interested in the way [the words] varied between regions,” says Smith. So he decided to start mapping them. This year, inspired by a query from the landscape linguist Robert McFarlane, he returned to the project, and recently completed a set of maps of the U.K., twisted all over with different words for “stream.”