Comment by gucci-on-fleek
3 hours ago
For an analogous but completely unrelated example, Stoney [0] has a word for "ocean" (mînîtâga) [1], but it's also only spoken in a landlocked region. So maybe human languages have a tendency to preserve/invent the word for "ocean" for some reason?
(I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_language
[1]: https://dictionary.stoneynakoda.org/#/L/m%C3%AEn%C3%AEt%C3%A...
Finnish language doesn't have an actual word for "ocean". We use "valtameri", which means something like main sea or great sea. And both "valta" and "meri" are Indo-European loans.
But in Livonian (an almost extinct Finnic language spoken in Latvia), Valdamer is one of the names for the Baltic Sea. So maybe that's the origin of the Finnish term as well.
> (I actually remember asking the professor why they had a word for "ocean", but he wasn't sure either.)
Most likely a reference to Houses of the Holy.