🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <34d73ed5.334499123@news.clark.net>,
Harlan Messinger <gusty@clark.net@remove.this.part.before.sending> wrote:
>"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@worldnet.att.com> wrote:
>
>>J. Kanze wrote:
>>> 
>>> Yes.  In the case of coastal "etang", I would probably use the word
>>> lagune in English, but certainly not pond.  I've always associated the
>>> word with stagner (English stagnate), which would associate it with
>>> water that wasn't moving: a pond as opposed to a river, but a lagune as
>>> opposed to a sea with tides (except that the Mediteranean doesn't have
>>> tides, at least to speak of).
>>> 
>>
>>In English it's "lagoon", borrowed from French or Italian in the later 
>>17th century (first attestation 1673). It's curious that the spelling 
>>didn't come in with the word. Is there maybe something Celtic it got 
>>attracted to?
>
>Might it be an incorrect analogy with "balloon", "saloon", "doubloon"?

Another part of the puzzle is, if it came from French, why is "lagoon" in
English now used for two rather different kinds of features, the tropical
lagoon inside the coar reef, and the coastal lagoons formed when a bar closes 
off a bay.  Whereas I understand that modern French uses "lagune" only
for the tropical coral kind.  So, did the usage broaden as it came into
english, or has it narrowed in French since 1673?  Or, did it come from
Italian?  Etymologically, 'lagune' seems obviously to come from the 
old Indoeuropean lac/lake/loch root for a water body, and 'etang' is from
the same root as 'stagnant'.

David Mark
dmark@geog.buffalo.edu