Letter from Dick Bulinski
Water – February 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ed,
In his fine article about sources of water and the risks of contamination and pollution of those supplies, John Mattingly touches on the derivation of the name vodka.
This is a very trivial addendum to what he wrote. Voda is Russian for Water. As is true in so many instances, there are cognates in related languages. These comments relate to the Polish names. In the Polish language, water is woda — really, the same name if one remembers that there is no v in the Polish alphabet, and that w is always pronounced v.