alt Hacker Newsbut what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils.
edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?
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It's a great question, and is tough to answer intuitively without speaking a native language that actually has such a word.
I would agree that "boiling milk" and "boiling oil" are very unlikely to get separate words, unless one of them happens to be an extremely common thing that people encounter a lot and that has special practical implications.
Milk might be a special case, in that it essentially is just water with some other stuff dissolved. It is to water as salt water is to water... but more so.
My guess would be that the single word might get pressed into service like "ice" does, but I think we'd have to find languages that include this word and survey native speakers. It could vary.
Nearly everyone encounters boiling water in everyday life, but do most people ever see other liquids boiling, even once, and especially during the historical periods that shaped our current languages? If not we might be getting into something like technical language, where daily life lines up poorly and terms and jargon get formalized.
I could see boiling oil being it's own word because when used as a weapon it's unlikely to actually be boiling and yet still be called "boiling oil".
What do you mean by "why we would have"? Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. If by "we" you mean English speakers, clearly you don't have a word for that. But if you mean some Slavic languages, they do. Likewise, English has "ice", while other languages simply call it "frozen water". Or take the example from the linked article, "at home", which some languages do have a separate word for. I don't think many languages have a distinct word for "at work" though, or "at the shop". That simply reflects that being at home is a more common and generally important concept, just like boiling water is more important in some sense than boiling milk.
Asking for the "reasons" behind a certain word existing is sort of like asking why the human body looks the way it does. Sure, scientists may have good theories why it was evolutionary advantageous to have five fingers and no tail, but in the end the only answer that's for certain is, "because it evolved that way". So the answer is, "we" have a word for boiling water because people found it useful to have such a word.
As you note, we have a specific word for solid water. Additionally, in colloquial speech “water” almost exclusively refers to the liquid state. Finally we have “steam” to refer to the gaseous state.
So English arguably has three unique words for the three common states of H2O.