In my dialect I could pick up stones/rocks from (say) a dry stream bed and throw them, either word works. I think you can just view throwing stones / throwing rocks as an edge case. It’s putting pieces of rock to a human purpose, but hardly a sophisticated purpose, it doesn’t involve any shaping or working. So either word can work. There’s certainly semantic overlap between “a rock” and “a stone”. The interesting cases are where one seems strongly preferred. There’s seems to be a broad pattern but maybe to some extent it’s just idiomatic.
I wonder if Finish being a different language family than the languages mentioned in the OP (which were either Indo-European or Afro-Asiactic) is a factor there? Do Hungarian or Estonian have one word just like Finnish?
After thinking about it a bit, I’m not sure the words are an exact parallel. While you would say that a cliff is made of sela and that Great Pyramid is made of even, sela also implies something big - generally, too big for a person to lift on their own. It doesn’t have to be as big as a boulder, although it can be, but it’s not something you can throw without a catapult. If you throw it, it’s an even.
Actually, you could add rocher to that list. Now as to the difference between these three words, I’d say purely intuitively :
- Pierre = aggregate mineral matter disconnected from the Earth’s crust that a single person can lift and throw without too much effort. It’s also something you can build stuff with (un pont de pierre = “a stone bridge”).
- Rocher = aggregate mineral matter disconnected from the Earth’s crust that a single person cannot lift and throw, although several persons could with some effort, depending on the weight/size. You do not build anything with that, linguistically at least.
- Roche = aggregate mineral matter still connected with the Earth’s crust. No matter how many persons try, it is not going anywhere. It is also something you find while digging (une couche de roche = a layer of rock).
I always think of stone as referring to something quite small, such as the stuff you might have in your garden/yard (could also call this gravel). Rock would refer to something a lot bigger, probably big enough to be too heavy to pick up.
Weird. For me the intuition is exactly the opposite: “rock” is little pieces. “Stone” is something big. (When used generically, not like in “gemstone” or “kidney stone.”) I also think of “stone” as more a material noun than “rock,” kind of like how “lumber” or “wood” is to “trees.”
Yeah, i like the “worked/unworked” split. I have rocks all over the place. But i just bought a piece of stone to use in my basement.
A rock breaker produces material for the stonemason. Yep.
Hmm. With my conversational level of Hungarian, I’m having trouble answering this question. Mostly, I would translate rock and stone to “kő.” However, if I had to choose two words, I would choose "
kő" / stone and szikla / rock. But szikla is more like a rock outcropping from the earth and maybe would be better translated as “cliff.” Charlie Brown wouldn’t call the thing dropped in his treat bag a “szikla.”
OK, I’m going to go with one word for both.
FWIW here’s the Swedish distinction:
Sten - stone and rock
Bergart - aggregate mineral matter, and only that, i.e. shape, location and size aren’t factors. It’s the label for limestone, granite, feldspar ASF.
Sten is obviously a cognate of stone, stein and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are from PIE.
…which makes it look like “pierre” is derived from “petra.” Or am I just seeing more of a similarity than there actually is because “Pierre” and “Petra/Peter” are both common, related names?
It looks like kivi and kő are cognates, going back to Proto-Uralic *kiwe.
Yeah, I think that there is the idea of one word for the material and one word for a piece of that material. You throw A stone, but it is made of rock. And then the words become interchangeable as dialects and accents use them as they see fit.
It’s really weird in that context, because I would almost always say “I threw a rock.” Like “I accidentally threw a rock through the window.” But then, “it’s a stone’s throw away.” But: “they pelted the car with rocks.” However, we skip stones. And “the statue is made of stone” (not “rock.”) It’s sort of arbitrary with me.
On the other hand, when designing and installing a rock garden, the material is referred to collectively as stone. On the other other hand, the type of stone may be called rock.
“What kind of stone are we using for this project?”
“One to two inch washed native river rock”
My sense is that “stone” (uncountable noun or adjective) is a material rock is made from (note limestone, sandstone), and most especially when the material that rock is made from is put to some human purpose.
While “a rock” and “a stone” (countable nouns) somewhat correlate with that distinction, they have much greater semantic overlap, and often the choice is just idiomatic. But I do think a weak correlation is there - the word stone tends to be used more when there is a stronger and clearer purpose, the word rock tends to be used when it’s a more casual purpose.
Yeah, something like is what I feel, as well.
In my mind “a stone” can be things like river rocks that are rounded by water into a roughly handheld or throwable form, even if they are entirely natural. I might (wildly) speculate that these were the ur-stones, and they found some human use (e.g. roads/fences/small buildings) and the term was later generalized to any rock that is usable by humans.
We might note that while a diamond is formally a “stone,” one slang term for it is “a rock,” e.g., “You should have seen the rock he gave her!” If slang = more casual, that sort of fits the distinction we’re talking about.
I should have included kő and szikla in the list, because I organized according to synonyms of szikla.
I looked up the Hungarian Wikipedia article on the Dome of the Rock and got szikla. Then I looked up the article on the Black Stone and got kő.