This is complete speculation, but I wonder if the less common inverted title (eg Lake Michigan, River Thames, etc) comes from English’s French influence. In French they usually invert the title in this way. For example, what we call the Eiffel Tower, they call the Tour Eiffel.
I just looked it up, so the French use tour for traveling from place to place and a tall thin tower? I obviously don’t know French, I wonder if it’s from touring (as in travel) small thin buildings.
I did some digging and the two words have different etymologies. So it’s a coincidence. English has many words that share the same spelling but have different meanings/etymologies as well. “Fan” for example. For “tour”, the “tower” usage comes from the Latin “turrem” which also means “tower”, and the “tour” usage comes from the Latin “tournāre” which means “to turn”.
That’s super interesting, so it sounds like it’s just a shortened version of two different words. Words go on such long journeys.
Lake Michigan is a name as is the Pacific Ocean. Any old lake in Michigan would likely be referred to by its name or “a lake in Michigan”.
Yeah, here in Kentucky we have Kentucky Lake right next to Lake Barkley. Names is just names.
Because your language is weird.
In Italian for example we say Lago di Como Mare del Nord (the North Sea) Oceano Atlantico Fiume Po (the River Po)
Same in Spanish I think
For most English linguistics questions, this will be the answer.
You should cross post this to !linguistics@lemmy.ml
