The physical features of a landscape can be fruitful areas of investigation for the scholar interested in lexical variation, as exemplified by my earlier post on "flat-topped hills" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. Another prompt targeting such features was one that was typically formulated in the interviews as "What do you call a roadway through the mountains in this area?" As illustrated in the figure below, this prompt resulted in a broad range of responses from the 70 informants in the survey:

Fig. 1: Variants of "roadways through the mountains" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

While eastern terms for such a road in the eastern states include notch and gap, the latter of which is used in LAMR once, the expected term for this going into the project was pass. As shown in the figure, pass(es) was indeed by far the most frequent response, followed by mountain pass(es). However, there are several responses that were not expected by are fairly well represented in the data, including trail(s) and valley. A favorite term of mine for this feature is cut.

For a word search on these variants, go to this puzzle.

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