Male and female mountains and rivers
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"Indonesia Volcano Eruption Sends Ash Soaring 11 Miles High", NYT 7/7/2025:
A volcanic eruption in Indonesia on Monday sent an ash cloud soaring about 11 miles high, far higher than a plume produced by the same volcano when it erupted last month.
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on the southeastern Indonesian island of Flores, spewed the ash when it erupted for about six minutes on Monday morning, the national volcanic agency reported. It erupted several more times later in the day.
That’s a lot of ash: The cloud was nearly four times taller than the three-mile-high one that Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki produced when it erupted last month.
That's also a lot of syllables — eight in the name Lewotobi Laki-laki, nine if we include Mount.
A quick check of the 13,251,059 geographical names at geonames.org turns up plenty that are as long or longer, although we should probably not count organizational names like "Centro de Estudios Superiores Unidad Profesional Interdisciplinaria de Ingeniería y Ciencias Sociales y Administrativas Instituto Politécnico Nacional" or "Edna Bay Volunteer Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services". But that still leaves plenty of things like "Middle Fork North Prong Little Black River" or "Right Hand Prong West Fork Pigeon River" or "Little Mattamiscontis Mountain".
Curiously, "Lewotobi Laki-laki" isn't in the list, although "Sungai Dato Laki-laki" is.
Sungai is Indonesian for "river", and laki is Indonesian for "man", so as discussed in "Lewotobi Laki-laki" (11/8/2024), "Sungai Dato Laki-laki" means something like "male Dato river", and unsurprisingly there is also a "Sungai Dato Perempuan", or "female Dato river".
I'm guessing that the use of "male X" vs. "female X" for mountains and rivers has some kind of metaphorical interpretation — but it's not clear what the metaphor is.
As noted in the earlier post, the male peak of mount Lewotobi is smaller than the female peak, as well as being more active:
The size metaphor might go either way, as in the "mother of all X" idiom, or the fact that in Yoruba drum families, the biggest drum is the "mother drum". But other connections are obviously possible.
So in the first place, can anyone define for us the geographical and linguistic distribution of the "male X" and "female X" naming practice for things like mountains and rivers? And second, what is the figurative meaning of the distinction?
Anon said,
July 8, 2025 @ 8:41 am
Male volcanoes being active (capable of erupting) makes sense…
Roscoe said,
July 8, 2025 @ 8:41 am
Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Camp was built between two lakes with Native American names: Lake Wabakaness on the boys’ side, and Lake Wabakanetta on the girls’ side. I always admired those natives for their foresight…
Brett said,
July 8, 2025 @ 12:57 pm
As to multisyllabic male and female volcanoes, and which one is active—there are Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl in central Mexico. Because of the length of the names, they are normally known as Popo and Ixta. Popo is the man, and according to the myth, when the pair of star-crossed lovers became mountain peaks, he was literally carrying a torch—which is why Popo smokes and Ixta does not.
@Roscoe: It's funny that Interlochen is relatively well known, but the lakes it is inter– are far, far more obscure.
Chris Button said,
July 8, 2025 @ 5:16 pm
I recommend Jim Matisoff's 1992 article The Mother of all Morphemes
HS said,
July 8, 2025 @ 10:22 pm
New Zealand, like Mexico, also has some multi-syllabic male and female volcanoes. Most of these are grouped together in the center of the North Island*, but Mount Taranaki is further to the west, in Taranaki province, beyond the W(h)anganui** River. Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe, Tongariro, and Taranaki are large and volcanically active***, and are male in Maori mythology, while Pihanga is somewhat smaller and inactive, and is female. There is a nice Maori legend about how Taranaki and Tongariro fought over Pihanga****, and Taranaki was defeated and fled westward, carving out the course of the Wanganui River in the process. For a nice statement of the legend and a stunning animation, see here. *****
Both Mount Taranaki and the Wanganui River, by the way, are now officially persons – they have both been given legal personhood (though I don't know whether they are officially male or female). See here and here.
Whether any of this has any bearing on Professor Liberman's question, I'm not sure.
Notes of varying degrees of linguistic interest:
* To New Zealanders, it is always the North Island and the South Island, despite the fact that the names appear as just North Island and South Island on maps. You can always tell that someone is a foreigner here when they refer to "North Island" and "South Island" without a "the". The non-use of the definite article on maps also seems to be affecting the spoken form of other geographic terms in English. These days I not infrequently hear (and even read) the names of rivers and glaciers used without an article, but both unquestionably take a "the" for me. (Though streams and creeks don't – go figure.)
** There has been a long-standing and often acrimonious debate in New Zealand over whether the spelling here should be "Wanganui" or "Whanganui". This debate unfortunately has often been more political than linguistic – more about the bloody Maoris imposing their bloody ways on the rest of the good folk of New Zealand. [That last sentence is intended ironically, by the way, just in case anybody failed to get it. You can never tell with irony and Americans…] /w/ and /wh/ are distinct phonemes in Maori, but in the Taranaki dialect /wh/ is pronounced close to /w/. (It is still I believe phonetically distinct, but I don't speak Maori). English settlers would therefore have heard it as /w/. Up until recent times the official name of both the river and the city was "Wanganui". The official name of the river has now been changed to "Whanganui", but I believe "Wanganui" is still an official name for the city alongside "Whanganui", and most citizens of W(h)anganui unquestionably prefer "Wanganui". Being rather long in the tooth I personally prefer "Wanganui" for both the river and the city, even though the linguist in me knows that "Whanganui" is more sensible. In either case, the increasingly common pronunciation of the name with an English /f/ sounds absolutely awful to me. Interestingly, there is a much smaller Wanganui River on the west coast of the South Island, which is officially spelt without an "h" and as far as I am aware nobody has ever complained about it or suggested changing it.
*** Mount Taranaki is not currently active but has been within the last few hundred years – well within the timespan of Maori settlement in New Zealand.
**** Typical. It's always the bloody men fighting over the women. Some things will never change.
***** There are various versions of the legend which differ in the details. One version has even made it across the Pacific and onto the website of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an official US governmental science organization – see here. Though how long that webpage, and indeed the NOAA, will survive under President Trump is perhaps an open question….
JPL said,
July 9, 2025 @ 9:52 pm
Given the limited info in the post and links, I would hazard a guess that it is more a case of personification than a more abstract distinction, like that between "male" and "female" or "man" and "woman", or something involving metaphor. So, to use some of the terms in the links, when a local person refers to the volcanoes erupting (which one?") it would be like an English speaker saying "the bloke" and "the dame", or an American saying "the guy" and "the gal". There's more to the distinction in English between "man" and "bloke" (or "guy"), and between "woman" and "dame" (or "gal") than is described by merely "formal vs. informal". The fact that the form "laki-laki" is a reduplication is probably significant, and I can imagine it involving a bit of swagger. Of course, I could very well be completely wrong.
@Chris Button: Thanks for the link to the Jim Matisoff article, very interesting, as usual. It's worth a post in its own right. But I don't think the present case is a matter of "metaphorical extensions and grammaticalizations of" a gender distinction. (WRT the fact that "There was something immediately appealing about this calqued construction to English speakers both in Britain and the U.S., and for a while it spread like wildfire,", how much was due to whoever added "all" to "the mother of (all) battles)"?)
Chas Belov said,
July 9, 2025 @ 11:47 pm
Twin Peaks in San Francisco was supposedly originally in Spanish the twin breasts of the Indian maiden.
Rodger C said,
July 11, 2025 @ 10:07 am
That "supposedly" covers a multitude of sins. I'm instantly suspicious of any explanation of anything containing the words "Indian maiden."
Coby said,
July 11, 2025 @ 12:23 pm
In languages with grammatical gender, the fact that a geographic name is masculine or feminine may lead to its being personified as male or female, respectively, as for example in the old song La Seine (sung by Jacqueline François): Car la Seine est une amante / Et son amant c′est Paris.