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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Apropos of nothing, it seems weird to me that we observe a vocabulary distinction in identical phenomena based on where those phenomena are located.

A prairie is called a steppe if it's in Asia. A steppe is called a prairie if it's in America.

A hurricane is a typhoon, except it's striking the west coast of the Atlantic instead of the west coast of the Pacific.

None of these make any difference to what the object is like. Why do we care? We don't call mountains something different when they're in Asia. We don't even call them something different when they're underwater, which makes a huge difference.

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Your distinction around hurricane vs typhoon is off. Typhoon is the name in the pacific west of 180 degrees longitude (in the jurisdiction of the JMA), hurricane is the name in the pacific east of 180 degrees, or in the atlantic (jurisdiction of the NHC). In the south pacific and indian ocean, they are called cyclones instead, so there's really three names. The difference in naming is simply because the organization responsible for reporting on them is going to use the name most familiar to it's country of origin.

Also, prairie and steppe are subtly different, though if it weren't for historic reasons they might be named the same. A prairie is more moist and has more vegetation as a result, and can support more trees and general flora/fauna.

> In the south pacific and indian ocean, they are called cyclones instead, so there's really three names.

This is not true of American English, where "cyclone" unambiguously refers to a tornado.

I'm going to disagree with you there. Anecdotally, I've lived in tornado alley my whole life and nobody has ever referred to a tornado as a cyclone in real-life conversation, although I'd know what they're referring to based on context clues.

Outside the heartland, the NHC categorizes many storms below the level of hurricane (64 knot sustained winds) as various kinds of cyclone (tropical cyclone, extratropical cyclone, potential tropical cyclone, post-tropical cyclone, alongside depressions).

In fact, in meteorology terms, a tornado is definitively different from a cyclone (a column of rotating area vs an area of area rotating around a low-pressure system). Hurricanes and typhoons are both kinds cyclones.

Well, hurricane is a Caribbean word and typhoon is an Arabic word. These two languages named the phenomenon before they could share a word for it.

Not that weird. The English language emerged from the needs of people from various linguistic backgrounds to describe things. It was not cleanly designed with top down clarity.

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