Talk:Earth and water

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Parallels in other languages

In Vietnamese, the normal word for a "country", e.g. the country of Vietnam, is dat nuoc (I have missed out the diacritics), which literally means "earth and water". Since Vietnam is a long way from either Persia or Greece this is unlikely to be a direct derivation. Does it indicate that there is something basic in the idea that the land fundamentally includes the water (rivers, lakes), that contributes to making it habitable? Itsmejudith 22:59, 13 May 2007 (UTC)