As in theme park and water park, opposed to national park and public park.
It seems like a bottleneck in language that I am struggling to find a way around. I believe the word park is poisoned in embedding models and would like to test that theory but I’m at a loss. I tried my usual thesaurus, looking at translations, and at etymologies but it seems like the word has no effective alternate so far. It is a rather interesting conundrum beyond the scope of my application – how would you differentiate and specify what a place like Disneyland is, without ambiguity, when “park” is not a useful word? And no land is not specific enough to describe the place.
I have a few ideas and stuff I have tried but I really want to know your ideas.
Etymology according to Wiktionary:
From Middle English park, from Old French parc (“livestock pen”), from Medieval Latin parcus, parricus, from Frankish *parrik (“enclosure, pen, fence”). Cognate with Dutch perk (“enclosure; flowerbed”), Old High German pfarrih, pferrih (“enclosure, pen”), Old English pearroc (“enclosure”) (whence modern English paddock), Old Norse parrak, parak (“enclosure, pen; distress, anxiety”), Icelandic parraka (“to keep pent in under restraint and coercion”). More at parrock, paddock. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/park
That is a really good one I hadn’t thought of.
Recreational facility is another one. I’ve also made notes like locus recreationis is Latin for place of recreation. I have no clue what I am doing with Latin and conjugation, but Palaestra was the exercise area next to Roman bath houses so maybe combining those is a way of conveying the closest ancient Latin equivalent.
It is funny that Park is actually quite a negative word in origin as pinned animals. You’d think marketing would obliterate that term. I suppose resort is the marketing replacement. The etymology is certainly in line with that premise:
From Middle English resorten, from Old French resortir (“to fall back, return, resort, have recourse, appeal”), back-formation from sortir (“to go out”).