Etymologically
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Wald

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Pronunciation

Forms

Wald m (genitive Waldes or Walds, plural Wälder, diminutive Wäldchen n or Wäldlein n)[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle High German walt, inherited from Old High German wald, inherited from Proto-West Germanic *walþu, inherited from Proto-Germanic *walþuz (“forest, wild land”).[2][1][3] The same word is Old Saxon wald, Middle Low German wolt, Dutch woud, Old Frisian wald and Old English weald (“forest, wooded upland”), whence wold, while Old Norse vǫllr means “field, meadow, ground” and Swedish vall “pasture”.[2][4][3] No Gothic form is recorded.[5]

Kluge starts from a sense “tuft”, especially “foliage, leafy twigs”, which was then widened to “forest”, as with Busch.[2] Outside Germanic he compares Old Irish folt (“hair of the head, foliage”) and Lithuanian váltis (“oat panicle”), from Proto-Indo-European *wolət-, whose zero grade is seen in Ancient Greek λάσιος (lásios, “hairy, thickly overgrown”); these may belong with Latin vellō (“to pluck”) and the word for Wolle.[2][6] Pfeifer gives the same comparison only as a possibility and also mentions a link with saltus (“wooded mountain land”).[4] The Duden dictionary holds that the word first named land not under cultivation, perhaps “plucked foliage”, and that it may be related to wild;[7] the Grimms' dictionary also favoured “uncultivated land” as the starting point, which would explain the Norse sense “field”.[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

Old High German wald is first recorded in glosses of about 765, then in the Benedictine Rule, Otfrid, the Physiologus, the Vienna Dog Blessing and Notker, meaning “forest, wilderness” and perhaps “treetop”.[8][9] Middle High German walt meant a forest, a wooded mountain range, a stand of trees, and also the leafy branches of a tree.[4][10] In Hartmann's Erec a knight rides through a rûher walt âne wec, “a rough forest without a path”.[11]

Semantic evolution

The old plural was walde or welde;[12] Wälder appears now and then from the 15th and 16th centuries and became common in the 17th.[12] The Middle High German dative plural walden survives in place names such as Unterwalden and Churwalden.[12] The word names wooded mountain ranges, as in Schwarzwald, Thüringer Wald and Bayerischer Wald.[12][13] Through the West Germanic word it also passed into Old French gaut (“brushwood”).[5]

Figuratively a Wald is a crowd of things that rise up like trees, as a forest of lances or of ships' masts.[12][14] After Latin silvae, 17th-century poets from Opitz on called a collection of mixed poems Wälder, and Herder's Kritische Wälder (1769) and the Grimms' journal Altdeutsche Wälder (1813–1816) kept the title.[12][13] Ludwig Tieck coined Waldeinsamkeit in 1796, and it became a catchword of Romantic feeling.[12] In the early 1980s Waldsterben, the dying of trees from air pollution, entered public awareness and was chosen word of the year in 1983.[12] The compound Waldhorn was borrowed as Czech valdhorna.[15]

Timeline

  • c. 765 – Old High German wald appears in glosses.[8]
  • 14th century – Waldbruder “forest hermit” is formed after Latin eremita.[12]
  • 15th century – The adjective waldig and the plant name Waldmeister are first recorded.[4][12]
  • 17th century – The plural Wälder becomes common, and poets call collections of poems Wälder.[12]
  • 1769 – Herder publishes his Kritische Wälder.[12]
  • 1796 – Tieck coins Waldeinsamkeit in Der blonde Eckbert.[12]
  • 1983 – Waldsterben is word of the year.[12]

Meanings

Noun

  1. A forest, a large area thickly grown with trees; woods: Hinter dem Dorf beginnt ein dichter Wald.[14][1]
  2. ein Wald von …: a great number of tall things standing close together: Über der Stadt erhob sich ein Wald von Kränen.[14][12]
  3. (literary studies, dated) Wälder (plural): a miscellany, a collection of writings or poems.[14][13]

Word family

  • waldig
  • Waldung
  • bewaldet
  • entwalden
  • Waldmeister
  • Waldeinsamkeit
  • Waldsterben
  • Waldhorn
  • Urwald
  • Wolle
  • wild
  • English wold

Usage notes

Den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen, to miss the whole for the many details, goes back to Wieland's Musarion.[14][12] The proverb wie man in den Wald hineinruft, so schallt es heraus, meaning that people treat you as you treat them, is recorded from Early New High German on.[12][14] Jemandem einen vom Wald erzählen is colloquial for telling someone something untrue.[14]

References

  1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d Kluge, Friedrich; Seebold, Elmar (2011), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 25th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 968
  3. ^ a b Kroonen, Guus (2013), Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 11, Leiden / Boston: Brill
  4. ^ a b c d Pfeifer, Wolfgang, et al. (1993), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, 2nd ed., Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; digital revised version in the DWDS, dwds.de
  5. ^ a b c Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm (1854–1961), Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 vols. in 32, Leipzig: Hirzel; digital: Wörterbuchnetz, Trier Center for Digital Humanities, p. 27, 1072
  6. ^ Orel, Vladimir (2003), A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, Leiden / Boston: Brill
  7. ^ Duden. Das Herkunftswörterbuch: Etymologie der deutschen Sprache (2020), 6th ed., Duden vol. 7, Berlin: Dudenverlag, p. 918
  8. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2014), Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 6th ed., online, koeblergerhard.de/wikiling
  9. ^ Schützeichel, Rudolf (2012), Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 7th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 369
  10. ^ Köbler, Gerhard (2014), Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., online, koeblergerhard.de/wikiling
  11. ^ Lexer, Matthias (1872–1878), Mittelhochdeutsches Handwörterbuch, 3 vols., Leipzig: Hirzel; digital: Wörterbuchnetz, Trier Center for Digital Humanities, p. 3, 657
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Paul, Hermann (2002), Deutsches Wörterbuch: Bedeutungsgeschichte und Aufbau unseres Wortschatzes, 10th ed., ed. Helmut Henne, Heidrun Kämper and Georg Objartel, Tübingen: Niemeyer
  13. ^ a b c Adelung, Johann Christoph (1793–1801), Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 2nd ed., 4 vols., Leipzig: Breitkopf
  14. ^ a b c d e f g Duden. Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in zehn Bänden (1999), 3rd ed., Mannheim: Dudenverlag
  15. ^ Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012–), Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, lwp.ids-mannheim.de