Emily — good guess, but ‘power’ is unrelated. It’s cognate with ‘potent’, and goes back to PIE ‘potis’, meaning ‘able, capable’. …As far as I know, fire and water were the only two elements treated this way. PIE for air was either ‘pneu’ (root of Greek ‘pneuma’) or ‘speis’ (root of ‘spirit’, ‘aspirate’), but I don’t know if there’s any evidence that the two roots had different spiritual connotations. The only PIE root for ‘earth’ I can find is ‘er’, which seems to have been a word for ‘the world’. (In the Silmarillion, the word Tolkien says was used to create the universe was ‘Ea!’, which would be a British pronunciation of ‘er’. Coincidence? )

As for the morphological distinction: if I remember right, the animate / inanimate distinction in PIE seems to have evolved into the masculine / feminine distinction in most of the daughter languages, rather than a mass / count distinction. Which is a shame, considering how bogus the masc / fem distinction is, compared to the animate / inanimate or mass / count. What the *&^* were they thinking??

I find it fascinating that the two mass nouns under discussion both had two roots, ones for the mass of the thing, the other for the fluidity. How many other mass nouns is that true for? Could this be why they are treated differently morphologically?

Great stuff!

Thank you, Jeff!

PS- Thank you, also, for your marvellous short stories! I loved them!