The words for water: reading Canada's landscape vocabulary out of 365,395 place names

Natural Resources Canada publishes the whole Canadian Geographical Names Database as a weekly CSV. It holds 365,395 officially approved names, and 224,924 of them, 61.6%, are attached to water features. Before Canada is a country of mountains or prairie or cities, it is, in its own naming records, a country of lakes and brooks and coves.

Northrop Frye thought the Canadian imagination was less troubled by “Who am I?” than by “Where is here?”. The names file is one long, extremely literal attempt at an answer. What interested me is that the answer is given in different words depending on where you stand, and that the file is big enough to draw the boundaries between those words.

The field that looks like the vocabulary is not the vocabulary

The CSV has a Generic Term column, which looks like exactly what I wanted. It is not. It is a translation of what I wanted.

Lac Saint-Jean is filed under generic term Lake. So are the other 64,000 lacs. The column normalises every name to a controlled English vocabulary, so querying it tells you how many bodies of standing water Canada has and nothing at all about what anybody calls them. The one column that appears to hold the words is the one column with the words taken out.

The words are still there, in the name strings, so they have to be read back out. That needs a rule about where a generic sits, and the rule is a property of the language rather than of the word: English puts the generic last, in Otter Brook, and French puts it first, in Ruisseau de la Loutre. So I scan the opening tokens for a French generic, and fall back to the final token for an English one. French wins the tie, which is what makes Baie du Grand Ruisseau read as a bay rather than as a stream.

That rule classifies 222,549 names, 60.9% of the database, into 68 generic words. It can be checked, because CGNDB’s own Generic Term is an independent opinion about the same feature. Agreement is 98.5% for lake, 98.8% for creek, 98.2% for brook, 97.0% for lac. It is 71.8% for pool and 60.5% for barasway, which are exactly the rare words this note is most interested in, so those two should be read as indicative rather than as counts.

There are more lacs than lakes

64,661 lacs against 58,923 lakes. The most Canadian noun in English is outnumbered in Canada’s own gazetteer by its French equivalent, by 5,738, and almost the entire margin sits in one province: 99% of lacs are in Quebec.

The reason is not that Quebec has more lakes than the rest of the country. It is that Quebec’s lakes have been surveyed and formally named at a density the Shield country of Ontario and Manitoba has not matched, and the effect is large enough to flip a national total. This is worth holding onto, because it is the standing objection to everything below: a word map made from a gazetteer is always partly a map of who did the surveying.

The brook line

Two words for a small watercourse, drawn from the same English:

	brook	creek
total	7,795	23,020
Atlantic provinces	97.3%	0.0%
British Columbia	1%	47%

Not “mostly”, not “predominantly”. Of 23,020 creeks in Canada, the four Atlantic provinces hold none. The two words divide the country between them and the division is essentially total.

Use the head-to-head buttons to see it, and the filter to go looking for a particular word.

Cells are A5 pentagons at resolution 6, roughly 8,300 km² each, which is about the coarsest grain that still separates Cape Breton from the mainland. I have used H3 for this kind of aggregation before; A5’s cells are equal-area by construction, which matters more than usual over a country spanning 42 degrees of latitude, where hexagon area quietly drifts as you go north. Colour runs by decile, because the counts are heavily right-skewed and a linear ramp would leave nine tenths of the range unused.

pond is the other half of the same story. 82% of Canada’s 8,127 ponds are in Newfoundland and Labrador, where a pond is not a small thing: Newfoundland uses the word for bodies of water that Ontario would call lakes without hesitating. The word is doing different work, not describing a different size.

Words that belong to exactly one place

Sorting by how concentrated a word is, rather than how common, turns up the short list of generics that never travelled:

word	names	where
steady	163	Newfoundland, 100%
barasway	61	Newfoundland, 100%
fosse	1,282	Quebec, 100%
sunker	40	Newfoundland, 98%
tickle	252	Newfoundland, 96%
pool	334	Nova Scotia, 82%
stream	164	New Brunswick, 76%
drain	472	Ontario 61%, Manitoba 39%

The federal glossary of generics defines a steady as “still water of a brook or river, not apparently affected by stream flow”, and gives its French equivalent as fosse, “a part of a stream that is deeper and less fast-flowing than the surrounding waters”. Two words for the same stretch of quiet river. 163 of them in Newfoundland, 1,282 in Quebec, and no overlap whatsoever. The steady / fosse button on the map is the whole bilingual question in one picture: not a border, but two vocabularies that each stop dead where the other begins.

drain is the flat opposite and my favourite entry in the table. It is not folklore, it is drainage law: a ditched watercourse under Ontario’s and Manitoba’s municipal drainage regimes, formal enough to be named and gazetted. Two provinces have a legal category the others lack, and it shows up in the national names file as a word.