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.
Then, wòdka is a diminutive form of woda, and is semi-reserved for the name of the alcoholic drink.
The suffix ka or ki or kie depends on the case, gender and number of the root word. Secondly, that ò, pronounced as a soft oo, is just one of the variants of several of the letters in the alphabet that augment the otherwise diminished character-set.
Who cares ?
Dick Bulinski
Boulder