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Welt

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Pronunciation

Forms

Welt f (genitive Welt, plural Welten)[1] Old High German had many spellings, among them weralt, werolt and worolt, and Middle High German mostly used the shortened werlt.[2] The standard form welt is found from the 12th century, first mainly in Alemannic texts, and became frequent only in late medieval manuscripts.[2][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle High German werlt, inherited from Old High German weralt, inherited from Proto-West Germanic *weraldi, inherited from Proto-Germanic *weraldiz.[4][3][1] The same word is Old Saxon werold, Old English weorold and Old Frisian warld, and today Dutch wereld, English world and Swedish värld;[4][3] Pfeifer thinks Old Norse verǫld was probably borrowed from Old English.[4][3]

It is an old compound.[4][3][5] The first part is Proto-Germanic *weraz (“man”), found in Gothic 𐍅𐌰𐌹𐍂 (wair), Old Norse verr, Old English wer and Old High German wer, and outside Germanic in Latin vir, Old Irish fer, Sanskrit वीर (vīrá) and Lithuanian výras;[4][3][6] it survives in Werwolf and Wergeld.[5][7] The second part is a noun meaning “age, lifetime, people”, kept in Gothic 𐌰𐌻𐌳𐍃 (alds) and ǫld, which belongs with alt to the root Proto-Indo-European *al- (“to grow, nourish”).[4][3][5] The Duden explains the compound as “age of men, lifetime of men”.[5] Kluge argues that the starting point was rather “the race of men, mankind”, like Latin saeculum and 𐌼𐌰𐌽𐌰𐍃𐌴𐌸𐍃 (manaseþs), and that both the sense “age” and the sense “earth” are secondary; the word did not start from a picture of space, as Old High German mittilagart (“world”) did.[4]

The modern form arose by assimilation, with the loss of the /r/ of the older form.[1][2]

Earliest recorded meaning

Old High German weralt is first recorded in glosses of the third quarter of the 8th century, and is frequent in the Isidor, the Muspilli, the Benedictine Rule, the Tatian, Otfrid and Notker.[8][9] It meant “time, age, eternity” and “mankind”, as well as “world, earth”; the phrase in werlte werlte meant “for ever and ever”.[9]

Semantic evolution

The Old High German word translated both saeculum and mundus, and so took on their senses: “age, lifetime”, “the people of the earth”, “the earth” and “the whole creation”;[3] Christian Latin added “earthly, sinful life”.[3] The temporal senses “lifetime” and “age” were still used in Middle High German but are now lost, as Adelung noted around 1800.[7][10] From the 14th century the language of natural science applied it to the universe as a macrocosm, and to man as a small world.[3] At the same time it came to name a whole mental sphere, as in eine Welt von Erinnerungen, a use that became common in the 18th century.[3]

In the sense “people” it gave alle Welt “everyone”, already in Old High German, and die große Welt, “high society”, which grew frequent in the 18th century under the influence of French monde.[7] The religious contrast between the world and the cloister gave weltlich, Old High German weraltlīh (9th century), the opposite of geistlich.[3][7] Umwelt first appears in 1800 in a German poem by the Dane Baggesen, perhaps after Danish omverden;[3] Goethe used it in 1816.[3] It later rendered French milieu, and the ecological movement made it a key word around 1970.[3]

Timeline

  • 3rd quarter of the 8th century – Old High German weralt appears in glosses.[8]
  • 9th century – The adjective weraltlīh “worldly” is recorded.[3]
  • 12th century – The shortened form welt appears beside werlt.[3][2]
  • 14th century – The word is applied to the universe and to the mental sphere.[3]
  • 1408 – vor gott und der welt “before God and the world” is recorded.[7]
  • 16th century – Weltmann takes the sense “man of the world”.[5]
  • 18th century – Weltall and Weltanschauung are formed.[5]
  • 1800 – Umwelt appears in a poem by Baggesen.[3]
  • First half of the 19th century – Weltschmerz is coined.[5]

Meanings

Noun

  1. The earth as the place where people live: eine Reise um die Welt.[11][1]
  2. All people, mankind;[11][12] alle Welt: everyone.[11][12]
  3. (dated) A social group or class: die feine Welt.[11]
  4. Life and existence in general, the way things are on earth.[11]
  5. A self-contained sphere or domain: die Welt des Theaters, die Welt der Kinder.[11][12]
  6. The universe; also a star or planetary system.[11][12]

Word family

  • weltlich
  • verweltlichen
  • Weltall
  • Weltanschauung
  • Weltkrieg
  • Weltmann
  • weltmännisch
  • Weltschmerz
  • Weltwunder
  • Umwelt
  • Halbwelt
  • Nachwelt
  • Werwolf
  • Wergeld
  • alt
  • English world

Usage notes

Auf die Welt kommen is “to be born”, and etwas aus der Welt schaffen is to settle or get rid of something.[11] Die Alte Welt is Europe and die Neue Welt America, and die Dritte Welt the developing countries.[11] The saying hier ist die Welt mit Brettern vernagelt, for a remote, dull place, goes back to a tall tale in the Ethographia mundi of 1608, in which a traveller reaches the end of the world and finds it boarded up.[11] Die Welt will betrogen sein renders Latin mundus vult decipi and is found in Murner.[7]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm (1854–1961), Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 vols. in 32, Leipzig: Hirzel; digital: Wörterbuchnetz, Trier Center for Digital Humanities, p. 28, 1456
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Pfeifer, Wolfgang, et al. (1993), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, 2nd ed., Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; digital revised version in the DWDS, dwds.de
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Kluge, Friedrich; Seebold, Elmar (2011), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 25th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 981
  5. ^ a b c d e f g Duden. Das Herkunftswörterbuch: Etymologie der deutschen Sprache (2020), 6th ed., Duden vol. 7, Berlin: Dudenverlag, p. 927
  6. ^ Kroonen, Guus (2013), Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 11, Leiden / Boston: Brill
  7. ^ a b c d e f Paul, Hermann (2002), Deutsches Wörterbuch: Bedeutungsgeschichte und Aufbau unseres Wortschatzes, 10th ed., ed. Helmut Henne, Heidrun Kämper and Georg Objartel, Tübingen: Niemeyer
  8. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2014), Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 6th ed., online, koeblergerhard.de/wikiling
  9. ^ a b Schützeichel, Rudolf (2012), Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 7th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 380
  10. ^ Adelung, Johann Christoph (1793–1801), Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 2nd ed., 4 vols., Leipzig: Breitkopf
  11. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Duden. Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in zehn Bänden (1999), 3rd ed., Mannheim: Dudenverlag
  12. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, das freie Wörterbuch (German Wiktionary), de.wiktionary.org