weisen

Forms

weisen (class 1 strong, third-person singular present weist, past tense wies, past participle gewiesen, auxiliary haben)^[1] Old and Middle High German inflected the verb weakly; strong forms appear sporadically in Middle High German and become frequent in the 16th century, while weak forms survive beside them in the 16th and 17th centuries, in Luther, Hans Sachs and Opitz.^[2] Paul compares the change with preisen and notes that newer editions of Luther's Bible replaced his weak forms with strong ones.^[3] The weak participle survived in the 18th century in the formula geweister Weg beside gewiesener Weg, and still does in some dialects.^[2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle High German wīsen, inherited from Old High German wīsen (“to lead, show”), inherited from Proto-West Germanic *wīsijan, inherited from Proto-Germanic *wīsijaną.^[4][5][1] The same verb is Old Saxon wīsian, Old Norse vísa, Old English wīsan and Old Frisian wīsa, and it continues in Dutch wijzen, Swedish visa and Icelandic vísa.^[4][5][2]

Pfeifer, Duden, Paul and the Grimm dictionary take it as a causative of the adjective weise (“wise”), meaning “to make knowing”.^[5][6][3][2] Kluge agrees that it certainly belongs to Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“to see, know”), the root of wissen, in which the sense “to direct, instruct” also occurs, but he finds the morphology unclear and the derivation from the adjective unlikely.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Old High German wīsen is first recorded in glosses of the late 8th century, then in the Benedictine Rule, the Muspilli, Otfrid, Notker and Williram, meaning “to lead, show, direct, invite, summon”.^[7][8] Pfeifer dates the senses “to lead, invite, summon” to the 9th century.^[5]

Semantic evolution

The verb first took an accusative of the person and a genitive of the matter, “to instruct someone in something”, as in the Nibelungenlied: wer wiset nu die recken somanege hervart (“who will now lead the warriors on so many campaigns”).^[3] This sense lives on in unterweisen.^[3] With a word of direction it came to mean sending someone a certain way, auf den rechten Weg or aus dem Haus.^[3] From Middle High German on it also meant “to show”, with the person in the dative: jemandem den Weg weisen;^[3] Luther writes that the devil weisete ihm alle Reiche der Welt.^[3]

In the older language of the law ein Urteil weisen and das Recht weisen meant to declare the law, the source of Weistum.^[3][4] The Grimm dictionary observed that the simple verb was really alive only in the literary language and in the dialects, not in everyday speech, where the compounds took over.^[2] English borrowed way-wiser, from Wegweiser, in 1651, and the verb lives on in Slovene vižati (“to lead, steer”).^[9]

Timeline

• Late 8th century – Old High German wīsen appears in glosses.^[7][4]
• 9th century – The verb means “to lead, invite, summon”.^[5]
• 16th century – Strong forms (wies, gewiesen) become frequent.^[4][2]
• 1651 – English borrows way-wiser from Wegweiser.^[9]
• 18th century – The weak participle survives in geweister Weg.^[2]

Meanings

Verb

1. (formal) To show (the way, the direction): Ein alter Mann wies uns den Weg zum Bahnhof.^[10][1]
2. To point in a direction or at something: Der Zeiger weist nach Süden.^[10][1]
3. (regional) To show, display: Er wies dem Schaffner seine Fahrkarte.^[10]
4. To send away, expel: Der Wirt wies die Störenfriede aus dem Lokal. Etwas weit von sich weisen is to reject it firmly.^[10]
5. (Switzerland) To show, prove: Erst der Winter wird weisen, ob das Dach dicht ist.^[10]

Word family

• ausweisen
• beweisen
• einweisen
• überweisen
• unterweisen
• verweisen
• abweisen
• anweisen
• aufweisen
• erweisen
• hinweisen
• nachweisen
• vorweisen
• Weiser
• Weisung
• Ausweis
• Beweis
• Wegweiser

Related words

• weise
• wissen
• Weistum

Usage notes

The Grimm dictionary keeps apart an obsolete verb weisen “to visit”, Middle High German wîsen, Old High German wīsōn, related to Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐍅𐌴𐌹𐍃𐍉𐌽 (gaweisōn, “to visit”), and a late formation weisen “to grow wise”, found only in the proverb mancher greiset, eh er weiset “many a man grows grey before he grows wise”.^[11]

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm (1854–1961), Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 vols. in 32, Leipzig: Hirzel; digital: Wörterbuchnetz, Trier Center for Digital Humanities, p. 28, 1078
3. ^ a b c d e f g h Paul, Hermann (2002), Deutsches Wörterbuch: Bedeutungsgeschichte und Aufbau unseres Wortschatzes, 10th ed., ed. Helmut Henne, Heidrun Kämper and Georg Objartel, Tübingen: Niemeyer
4. ^ a b c d e f Kluge, Friedrich; Seebold, Elmar (2011), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 25th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 980
5. ^ a b c d e Pfeifer, Wolfgang, et al. (1993), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, 2nd ed., Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; digital revised version in the DWDS, dwds.de
6. ^ Duden. Das Herkunftswörterbuch: Etymologie der deutschen Sprache (2020), 6th ed., Duden vol. 7, Berlin: Dudenverlag, p. 926
7. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2014), Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 6th ed., online, koeblergerhard.de/wikiling
8. ^ Schützeichel, Rudolf (2012), Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch, 7th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 394
9. ^ a b Lehnwortportal Deutsch (2012–), Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim, lwp.ids-mannheim.de
10. ^ a b c d e Duden. Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in zehn Bänden (1999), 3rd ed., Mannheim: Dudenverlag
11. ^ Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm (1854–1961), Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 vols. in 32, Leipzig: Hirzel; digital: Wörterbuchnetz, Trier Center for Digital Humanities, p. 28, 1102