# An analysis of the concept of river

This article by Dan Polansky analyzes the concept of river. One might think that everyone knows what a river is, but I have found something analytically interesting here. Perhaps someone will find these deliberations useful as well.
First of all, we may distinguish river from a stream, and rivulet. But that does not seem to lead to really interesting questions. It merely distinguishes different sizes of channeled (natural?) water streams.
Is river a stream of water? In particular, is riverbed part of river? It could be. One could see river as a compound object consisting of a river stream and the riverbed. This would distinguish river from a stream of water flowing out from a faucet. What about a stream of water flowing through a half-open pipe, one that results from splitting a pipe in half along the long axis? That would be more like this compound object of river.
Then, a river individual is a stream of water flowing through a riverbed, one that has an origin and an end. The existence of tributaries complicates the matter. Are the tributaries part of the river? Apparently not, especially small ones. But what if two similarly large rivers merge into one larger stream? Is the merging point an origin of a new river? One may decide to conventionally claim one of the two merging rivers to be the same river as the outflowing merged river. But is it really the same river? There does not seem to be a fit answer.
To address the above quandary about merging rivers, we could identify the river with the river basin. Thus, all tributaries would be part of the river. Sure enough, this is not a conventional way of doing things on the maps, but why not? For one thing, the statement "he lives near a river" would lose its meaning; nearly everyone lives in some river basin so nearly everyone would live near a river (not even near it). There would be no river banks, unless one would consider the boundaries of the basin to be some kind of banks, which is uncustomary. And this concept of a river would probably deviate from a use in all human languages.
There is another way out of the above quandary. It is an observation that if we make a conventional arbitrary choice about which of the incoming rivers is the outgoing river, we can create a language custom that can be very productive. If all speakers understand the name of the river to refer to the part after the merge and a chosen part above the merge, they speak the same language (that uses a proper name) and can make statements understood to be true. But the question remains: is this arbitrarily designated or delineated entity really a river? If we want to nitpick, we can classify it as river-or-river-sequence, or the like.
We can ask what parts does a river consist of, if any. It does not consist of molecules of water; water is inflowing and outflowing from any fixed segment of the river or even the complete river. And yet, it would seem odd to identify a river only with the riverbed. And a dried up river is arguably no longer a river, making "dried up" an alienans.
The definition that sees a river as a compound of a water stream and riverbed does not match language dictionaries; they see river as a water stream. Britannica does emphasize that a river is channeled.. However, riverbed is perhaps not the only channel for a river.