Rock and stone are two synonyms, right? Or… are they?
Over the years as I kept learning languages I kept noticing a pattern: most languages have one word consistently translated as “rock” and a different word consistently translated as “stone.” They line up like this:
English: rock stone
Arabic: ṣakhr ḥajar
French: roche pierre
Greek: petra lithos
Hebrew: sela‘ even
Latin: rupes lapis
Turkish: kaya taş
For this pattern to exist, the two words cannot be perfectly synonymous. I thunk about it until I realized:
Rock is aggregate mineral matter still connected with the Earth’s crust.
Stone is aggregate mineral matter disconnected from the Earth’s crust.
Which explains why Ayers Rock, the Dome of the Rock, and the Rock of Gibraltar use the one word. And why gemstone, paving stone, and the Black Stone use the other word. This pattern had been in plain sight my whole life without my noticing it. Because in ordinary colloquial English, as far as everyone is concerned, the two words are essentially synonymous; in literary English you throw stones, but for the neighborhood kids where I grew up, you threw “rocks.”
But with stone - how do types of rock like limestone, sandstone, siltstone, etc. fit into this picture? Is it better to say that stone is a material that rocks are made from, and that the frequent “disconnected from the Earth’s crust” part derives from that - stone is often the word for the material after humans have dug it up and put it to certain uses?
There are so many exceptions that prove the rule. For example, the late Great Stone Face of New Hampshire. When it was still hanging off the mountain side, it was technically a Great Rock Face. But when it tumbled down into the valley below, it became stone (or stones). Although, now that I type it out, “rockface” is already a word with its own meaning, which might explain why they named it with “stone.”
Most of the languages I’ve surveyed have two distinct words, but Finnish has only one word, kivi, to cover both meanings.
I wpnder if the ‘disconnected’ is the distinguishing point. Rather ‘rock’ is natural, the stuff the world is made from, all around us and under our feet, but ‘stone’ has been altered by humans for their use?
I’m thinking of the city of Petra, clearly it is ‘stone’ though most of it is still part of the earth, just tunneled into and with the surfaces shaped and smooth to our taste.
Right, but limestone, sandstone etc. is also stuff that rock is made from before humans do anything with it. That’s why I think stone as a “material rock is made from” fits better. It can describe what constitutes a type of rock in situ, and stone is then also the word that tends to be used when humans use and shape the “material of rock” for some purpose.
The Charlie Brown “a rock” exception to the “connected with the Earth’s crust” rule makes some sense if the word stone tends to refer to the material rock is made from, especially when humans do stuff with that material. Because you usually only call it “a rock” when it’s a random fragment with no shaping or specific purpose.
Admittedly, there is some semantic overlap with “a stone”, but to my intuition “a rock” is closer to the random fragment sense, while “a stone” is probably smoother and can be something with a purpose.
It doesn’t always seem to require alteration, maybe just purpose. When random fragments of rock are put to a murderous purpose, we call it “stoning”. Whereas to my intuition Charlie Brown definitely gets a (purposeless) rock, not a stone.
Perhaps the “rock garden” is an exception because of a desired resemblance to a natural (without human purpose) state?
People with that hobby call themselves rock hounds. They’re looking for natural materials, mostly, though I bet they’d also pick up stone arrowheads.
In a science documentary I saw once, this scientist was somewhere on a vast rocky stretch. He would pick up a chunk of rock and whack it a few times with a hammer, trying to get it to split apart and reveal a fossilized leaf or whatever. What he picked up was clearly a rock. I think what he held afterwards was a stone with a fossil.
I lean towards rock = unworked, stone = worked. The reason that people in old books threw stones and now we throw rocks is that in the past, buildings and streets were made of stone, so throwing a stone is like throwing a brick - you’re tossing widely available construction material. Whereas today, you don’t have that many cornerstones or cobblestones lying around, so you throw rocks.
