Is "vodka" really Russian for "water?"

no it's vod

>>79364885
No I hate vodka just like any other alcohol.

>>79364885
Chinky Gay

voda

water is voda
vodka is the Russian diminutive (the little water) of voda. We too call clear liquids with a high alcohol content 'little water': aftershave is called vodica za po britju.

>>79364885
Make sense. It's colorless and some people drink it in place of water anyway. Some people call it water as a joke, this much we know. It's entirely possible for joke to become actual vocab in 100 years time.

I could have googled everything but instead I write the whole paragraph.

>>79364885
water is voda

>>79364885

In a lot of places around the world it wasn't easy to find safe drinking water and so making that water into alcohol was a good option for sterilization.

This happened in the U.S. with whiskey and it lead to the excessive alcohol abuse that lead Christians to call for prohibition.

Russians probably used Vodka similarly and since they were drinking the stuff for the water as much as the alcohol content it makes sense for the word to be so close to Russian for water.

Vodka is probably a loanword from Polish, because while it's true that morphologically it means "little water" in Russian as well, no one actually says "vodka" when they want to say "water" in diminitive. The proper word is "vodica" or "vodichka" for "little water".

So I think vodka is a loanword from Polish.

>>79365207
Russians traditionally drank kvas as a safe substitute for water.

>>79364942
chink, just chink

>>79364885
"Whisky" is Gaelic for "water".

>>79365870
Are you sure? I thought it was a corruption of aqua vita

>>79365207
>>79365351
Maybe a stupid question, dunno, but why not drink something "lighter" like beer or mead?