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Comment by kepler471 | Hacker News Reader

Even within Europe there are many different words used for water, very cool! This is not a comprehensive list:

  Germanic - wasser/water/voda/woda
  French - eau
  Italian/Spanish - aqua/agua
  Greek - nero (νερό)
  Danish - vand
  Romanian - apă
  Latvian - udens
  Turkish - su
  Welsh - dwr

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The Danish belongs in the "Germanic" list; as does the Norwegian "vann" and "vatn" (the latter also Faroese, Icelandic, Norn), and Swedish "vatten".

The Romanian and French both comes from the latin aqua, just like the Italian/Spanish.

Thanks for this!

Looking into it a bit more, the French is also from the latin source (aqua) - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eau

The Welsh suggests the Ancient Greek "hudor".

That resemblance is coincidental: hudor derives from Proto-Indo-European *wed- (as does English water, wet, winter) while dwr derives from Proto-Indo-European *dʰewb- "deep" (as does English dip, deep) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... https://www.etymonline.com/word/*wed-

The Irish uisce is the source for the English word whiskey.

Adding Basque to your list, the word is ur. (I don't know Basque, just looked it up.)

It is strange to see Slavic lumped in with Germanic. Is this common practice?

Both come from PIE "wódr" for water. Romance languages descended ftom a synonym "ekeh" which resulted in aqua/agua/eau/... and the word itself meant "a body of water" like a lake or a river iirc.

I only meant this as "similar to the Germanic", I don't know enough to give this category a proper name

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