Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German Word of the Day. This time we’ll have a look at the meaning of
Teil
Teil is the German word for part and it is related to the English word deal. Wait, the business deal? Yeah, that one. A few centuries ago deal was much closer to the original “not as ancient as Indo-European but still freaking ancient”-Proto Germanic root that was all about share, part, amount. And in fact, this notion is still visible today. Just take these phrases:
- That helps a great deal.
- A good deal of movie’s success is due to the excellent cast.
These are not not about trade. These are about large parts. The helps solved a substantial part of the problem and a substantial part of the success is thanks to the cast. The business-deal was … uhm… coined some 200 years ago, probably based on the meaning amount, which is not that far from part.
We’ll see even more connections between Teil and deal once we get to the verbs. But the noun Teil is really really cool and useful and there’s a lot to say about it. Let’s start with the gender. Yeay. That annoying gender that all the nouns have . Well guess what. Teil is an exception!
Now you’re like “Wow, really. A word without gender? AWESOME!!! That is the start of the revolution!!!” but then you see my face all serious and emphatic and you begin to realize… “It has two genders, doesn’t it?”
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Also isn’t a section of a newspaper a tangible phsyical part? Shouldn’t this be das?
Hah, nice fringe case.
So yes, the various sections are often printed on separate papers but it’s still sections defined by concepts.
This made me think of ripping a piece out of page in a book. That could still “der Teil” missing. Think of “das Teil” maybe as a tangible building block.
Ok cool, yeah i see the logic there
So another thing – I noticed you translated ganz gut as “all right”. I assume you meant “alright ” which can mean different things depending on context and tone of voice but here sounds more like the german “ok” as in not that great so i don’t think alright is such a good translation -what do you think?
“ganz gut” also depends on tone of voice, but generally “alright” is a pretty good match. Have you read the article on “ganz”?
hmmm maybe I haven’t. Perhaps I have been misunderstanding the tone of ganz gut…
“ganz” is NOT an intensifier in this case. It makes it “less”.
wow, i feel like this must be something a lot of learners get confused by…
It’s a very common mistake that people say “ganz gut” and think the “ganz” intensifies it, but their enthusiasm and the phrase itself are an absolute mismatch.
I’d say this would be a good topic to add to your “nuggets”
Already on the list :)
Hi Emanuel. I am struggling to see a consistent logic with this one.
Like why is it der Vorteil but das Vorurteil? You can just say “because German” and i’ll accept that.But am i right in thinking that the rule you suggest for Der/das Teil only works when speaking of the “Teil” alone – and nouns formed with Teil as a base need to be learned individually as these don’t really have a rule?
Also I personally have never heard “whale” used in this sense. I’d go for “monster” or maybe “beast”
Good question!!
I don’t really perceive the “teil” in Urteil as a separate unit, like I would in a compound noun. I think this “the last word determines the case” has a whole lot of exceptions once we include nouns with just prefixes and so on.
I think you left a comment about the same issue a few days ago, but I can’t find it :).
I am a bit overwhelmed with all the feedback for Duolingo.
Anyway, I checked and back in the day (a thousand years ago) the ancestor of “Urteil” was feminine, then neuter and feminine.
Genders shift over time more often than we might think and I think “Urteil” has detached in the minds from “Teil” a long time ago, so it settled on its own “das”.
Thanks for the answer. I will learn these all by heart then. Don’t think i commented on Teil recently, although commented on some different stuff. Perhaps that was someone else? Perhaps a phantom commenter leaving ghost comments that dissapear leaving no trace?
Nah, it wasn’t about “Teil” but about the gender of compound nouns that don’t really have a separate noun as the first part.
hmmm, not sure what that was. Did you see my question on hinkommen btw, i was on my phone and maybe not logged in when i wrote it
Just replied :)
thank you!
Great article as always! So pleasing to see how many compound nouns “Teil” originates (thus living up to its meaning…). A small typo in case you want to correct it: “shipping mall” should probably be “shopping mall“
Fixed it, thank you :)!!
And glad you enjoyed the article!
Another fabulous article! Thank you so much for all the hard work you put into these analyses!
Danke :)!
Your English is amazing. How did you achieve such a high level?
Vielen Dank für das Kompliment :). There are several factors:
– 9 years of school (though I couldn’t speak after, but it laid some serious foundation)
– 6 months abroad and my preparation for it (watching movies in the original)
– American ex-girlfriend
– youtube
– I wanted (and still want) to get better
– the writing I do here (even if there’s no one correcting it, when you have a certain level of fluency in speaking then your writing will most likely improve on its own if you do lots of it. You’ll catch yourself making mistakes or using weird phrasings more and more and you’ll correct them. If you check out the really old articles, you can see that my written English has evolved quite a bit :)
Well, congrats! It’s really quite incredible the amount of native English. At least in your more recent posts, you can read a ton before hitting any clue that you’re not native. Somehow it feels like ex-girlfriend may have been the x-factor :P At least, it would be really motivating for me.
I also wanted to say that I often find your explanations very insightful and quite clever, that it seems like you notice general patterns in your language very well. I can often get the vibe of a tricky word or prefix or whatever from your posts, which really is rather difficult to find, and that allows me to connect the dots much more quickly and successfully myself, learning from the outside. Thanks!
Hi Emanuel! I’m not an English native speaker. Still I got a question. Your example:
Manager sein hat so seine Vorteile.
Why “seine”? As in your English version “its” is used, and it refers to the fact “Being a manager”. So in the German version does “seine” refer to “Manager”?
It’ actually exactly as in English… the “seine” refers to the activity as a whole “being a manager” which in spoken German is “Manager sein”. German orthography has a problem when it comes to combinations like this (verb + noun). Technically it is one noun so it should be “Das Managersein”. But this is not how it feels, at least not to me. And this system falls apart anyway as soon as you try to say stuff like
– being a manager in a big company
– Managerineinergroßenfirmasein…
Nobody would ever write that or even try to read it.
I guess the proper solution would be to say
– Manager zu sein …
Then the “seine” would refer to that side sentence as a whole. Anyway, so think of “Manager sein” as one unit, one noun. Hope that helps.
Thanks for the quick reply. It seems I did not do my homework well. When I saw “seine” I thought the activity was “male”, but “seine” can actually be the possessive form of neutral nouns. Sorry! Next time I will do my homework more carefully before asking a question :)
Great word of the day! I hear and see this a lot so it’s useful to be able to put a bit of background to it.
A word I come across a lot which I can’t see mentioned is ‘teilweise’. I get the fundamental ‘partly/partially’ to it, but I’ve seen it around a couple of times where I can’t quite put a translation on it. I guess it sort of has a ‘sometimes’ feel to it as well?
Keep up the good work!
You’re totally right… based on logic “teilweise” should be partially but it is indeed often used in context of time… I actually have a couple of examples in part 2.
I look forward to it!
Thanks for the great post. Very useful word in german. I only have one question, however. How does” Du warst baden? ” work in this case? I’m a little confused :)
Wait, I’m confused… what does the example have to do with “Teil”? Or if it was a general question, what exactly are you struggling with (I feel like I have an idea but I ‘m not sure)
Oh , I should have been more clear :) All your examples here are great. I’m just struggling particularly with the “Du warst baden” sentence. I don’t quite get it from a grammatical standpoint. Does it work here as past progressive? Sorry, if my question is too obvious. I just started learning German and I enjoy it so so much. It’s my kinda language :)
Hi Emanuel, I guess I scared you off by saying I’m new to German and it’s pointless to spend time on a dummy who just started :) Well, not quite, in fact, I have been studying it for a year now. But I might have omitted in my grammar book ( or they have ommited ) a chapter that would explain the use of “sein” form (warst) and an infinitive (baden). Thanks in advance for the answer.
Hey Artur, just hang in there and he’ll get to your question. I think I’ve seen this whole weird little exception discussed either in a post or in comments somewhere on here, but I can’t find it at the moment. I can’t remember all the ins and outs of it, but basically it’s a shorthand way to describe past activities. It’s not far off from the way you’d use past progressive in English in some circumstances, but it doesn’t really have that progressive aspect (unless the situation requires it, maybe?).
It’s really a spoken-only form, as far as I know – I definitely never saw it in a textbook. Have you seen phrasings like “Ich gehe baden”? It’s really like that, just less “correct” (less formally acceptable, anyway).
Emanuel can correct me if I’m leading you astray…
A few additions… as a general structure it is not limited to past but really works in all tenses and even the conditional
– Ich würde arbeiten gehen.
And then, I wouldn’t say that it’s only for spoken German. Like… I really wouldn’t know how else to say the example above. Logic suggests a zu-construction but that would sound awfully wrong
– Ich würde gehen (um) zu arbeiten.
Connecting the infinitive directly is really the only way and as far as I am concerned it is standard German.
I guess it’s not in textbooks because it’s specific to a few verbs (gehen, sein, kommen… maybe rennen, laufen etc.)
So this construction is part of a bigger group:
– “verben” gehen/sein/kommen
– Ich gehe arbeiten.
– Ich bin einkaufen.
– Ich komme dich besuchen.
these work in all tense of course.
But don’t think of them as the progressive. It really only works with “gehen” “kommen” and “sein”.
Some call it “Absentiv” but if you ask me I’d think of it as an indication of location. Here’s a link to the answer I gave in a German language forum:
https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/6839/i-was-working-in-german
and one in German that is more about terminology:
https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/15529/absentiv-oder-doch-was-anderes
Let me know if that helps
I guess I always thought the gehen/kommen ones were more correct and the sein versions were informal or spoken-only. So my assumption was that…
– Du warst baden?
…was short for
– Du bist baden gegangen?
…or something like that. But I guess that’s just me being skittish about something that sounds too English to my ear. :)
I think that might be where the phrasing comes from but it might not. Maybe it’s just the modal pattern having an influence here…
– Ich will arbeiten.
– Ich bin arbeiten.
“sein” being kind of a modal that expresses fact ;)
The main thing that you should know is that sein + infinitive is strictly for informal language (unlike gehen + infinitive), so don’t try to put it in your essays, tech reports or other official documents ;)
Thank you very much for the clarification, all of you. That really helps.
“Manager sein hat so seine Vorteile.”
I have a question about the subject (“Manager sein”) in this sentence. “sein” looks live a verb so how can it be a subject?
“Mockingjay pt.1” was no so bad but it’s annoying that probably they’ve splitted the final part only to earn more money.
Good observation… I guess I should have written it with a capital “s” because it’s supposed to be a thing. The “being a manager”. This is one of the areas where German spelling really doesn’t know what to do. If it’s just a verb then you’d capitalize it, no problem
– (Das) Schwimmen ist gut für den Rücken.
But if the activity that you want to turn into a noun needs more words to be expressed… well… we don’t know what to do.
– Managersein… not really readable
– Manager Sein… NO
– Manager-Sein.. one fraction of Germans complain about hyphens and call people dumb who overuse it
– Manager sein … looks like a verb
I think officially it should be one word but even that falls apart when you add more stuff to the activity
– Manager-bei-Mercedes-Sein hat so seine Vorteil….
– Managerbeimercedessein… no way :D
I think the best solution would be using a zu-construction and keep the verb a verb but that’s just not how people talk. I mean they do, but they use the other way just as often.
“one fraction of Germans complain about hyphens and call people dumb who overuse it”
Das ist ja kein Argument, da das genau in diesem Fall kein Übermaß ist.
Manager-bei-Mercedes-Sein ist auch richtig.
https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/bindestrich
“Regel 27:
Substantivisch gebrauchte Infinitive mit mehreren Bestandteilen schreibt man mit Bindestrichen, wenn sonst unübersichtliche und schwer lesbare Aneinanderreihungen entstehen .
zum Aus-der-Haut-Fahren
das Nicht-mehr-fertig-Werden”
Da hab’ ich mal wieder was gelernt :)
It should be Manager-Sein, a noun.
Albeit it does look a bit like Manager-Sensei :D
So funny….I JUST looked this word up the other day and now I know all about it! Much thanks, as usual!
Good “Teilming” then ;)
Wow. Ich habe gedacht, ich habe das Wort gelernt, und ich wusste nicht der Großteil. Sehr schön, wie immer, danke. (Und die Wortschatzliste gefällt mir sehr, super hilfreich)
Also, on the subject of der/das Körperteil: People can do a similar thing in English.
“Maria hurt her leg and it/she is bleeding now.” “She” sounds slightly more personal, like a worried friend more than a doctor, but that’s a tiny difference and not something most people think about. Maybe when I’m editing my bestselling novel :) Also, it only works because the pronoun could be either for the leg or for Maria, so not in most sentences.
I agree with the basic thrust of what you’re saying about the pronouns, but I think “she’s bleeding” sounds quite a bit more serious than “it’s bleeding” – just because, as you say, one’s referring to the part and one’s referring to the whole.
To me, it’s hard not to hear “das Körperteil” as a body part that is… well, unattached. :0
What are they using at the St. Joseph :)?
I’m truly grateful not to have found out…
Kleine Korrektur:
– Ich wusste den Großteil nicht.
Ist ja “der Großteil”. Das “nicht” kann auch vor “den Großteil” aber dahinter ist besser weil… Gründe :)
Das Teilen, die Teilung, die Division. Do they all mean the mathematical operation? If so, what determines which is used? Is there any difference in usage of der Teiler and der Faktor?
“Das Teilen” is more about the procedure and it is the mathematical term while “Teilung” is more about the result in a general sense. As for “Teiler” vs. “Faktor”
1 divided by 10 … 10 is “der Nenner”, 1 ist “Zähler”
1 times 10 … 10 und 1 sind Faktoren
I can’t think of a mathematical use for “der Teiler” but it might exist.
Danke. “Nenner und Zahler”, so much simpler than “denominator and numerator”. The Teilen/Teilung distinction makes perfect sense now. Genau wie “das Rechnen” und “die Rechnung”.
“Größter gemeinsamer Teiler” has emerged from de.wikipedia and pointed also to “teilbar”. Ich erfreue mich!
Oh, that reminds me of another math term….
– kleinster gemeinsamer Nenner.
– least common denominator
And at least in German this is a WIDELY used metaphor for all kinds of contexts where there is a compromise.
So is the English, for sure. It’s typically negative/critical:
– The films of Michael Bay pander to the least common denominator.
Hah… I don’t think they do. I made my girlfriend watch Transformers 2 once (she had NO idea what she was in for) and I think the least common denominator for her would have been to give me a two hour massage instead… and we hate giving each other massages. It’s like work :)
As for the tone though.. I actually feel like the German version is kind of on the positive side. Like… at least there is SOME agreement.
Ah, OK… that’s a pretty different meaning, then. In the English expression, the “least common denominator” means the people, or at least their tastes and interests – Michael Bay movies appeal to the basic human desire to see stuff blow up real good, which is why they’re popular even though they’re not well made.
I think you could use the phrase to talk about a compromise solution and it might be understandable, but I don’t think it’s the way most English-speakers would first think to use it.
Und zu guter Letzt darf ein besonders wichtiges Teil nicht unerwähnt bleiben ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOPu0QFDWXg
Natürlich :D… die Zweideutigkeit bei diesem Song ist aber ein bisschen platt, sogar für Rammstein.
Die deutsche Sprache hat mich immer an eine Programmiersprache erinnert, mit ihrer Satzklammern und was auch immer. Das schießt aber den Vogel ab (und ja, ich kenne schon den Ausdruck):
“Eltern means parents and it only exists in plural. So if you need one without wanting to say mom or dad you could say Elternteil. It does sound a bit technical though”
Das wäre dann:
class Eltern {Teil_1, Teil_2, …};
Eltern.Teil_1 = …
;)
And
household.incomeprovider = array{Eltern.Teil_1, Eltern.Teil_2, Kinder.AdolescentSohn}
something like that :D. My Java days have long passed.
One useful rule of thumb that I read somewhere: if you can replace the Teil-word with “[das] Stückchen”, it’s das. Not that applicable to the more abstract stuff, but hey.
A fat thumb is better than none :)
Certainly better than a piece of a thumb…
I missed Teilnahme, which I once confused with Anteilnahme. But thanks for another fun lesson!
Yeah, I thought I’d do it with “teilnehmen” in part 2. As for the difference between “Teilnahme” and “Anteilnahme” though… the latter is pretty much sympathy/condolence/commiseration. So it’s mostly about “taking a part of someone’s misfortune”
Meine Anki Decke hat “teilnehmen” as “participate”. Besser als “partake”, ehh?
Haha… ja genau. Aber Englisch ist einfach ein Latein-Fanboy.
In Deutsch gibt es übrogens auch “partizipieren”. Wenn’s gebildet klingen soll :)
Achso… es ist ein Anki-Deck…. es sei denn du hast Vokabeln auf deiner Bettdecke.
Eigentlich könnte “partake” eine richtige Übersetzung für “teilnehmen” sein, wobei es eher nach dem Mitverzehren von Essen o.ä. klingt (wie “an einem Essen teilnehmen”).
Es gibt ja auch “take part” als Synonym für “participate”. Beides gehört zur alltäglichen, normalen Sprachebene.
Do you have any insight into why it’s “das Urteil”? It seems really counterintuitive, since most of the more abstract “-teil” compounds are masculine.
Apparently in the 9th century there were 3 versions … neuter, male and female, with different endings each. Might have been inspired by Latin since “Urteil” has always been about judgement. I guess neuter just won. Maybe partially because “Urteil” doesn’t feel very “Teil”-y … like…. people don’t think of it as a special “Teil” but as one solid entity.
Urteil is not related do Teil at all, but to ordeal. A completely different indoeuropean stem. If I understand it correctly.
So I just checked and you’re right that “Urteil” is related to “ordeal” but they do belong to “Teil/deal”. “Urteil” has always been about what you’re given especially in context of law. … the verdict. “Ordeal” is based on a special way of finding a verdict by making someone go through a physical trial to see how the Gods decide (a bit like trial by combat in Game of Thrones). From that it’s not very far to the vibe of suffering. that it has. The German “Urteil” has always been much more dry.
Here’s “ordeal” on etymonline.com:
https://etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=ordeal&searchmode=none
Yes funny, I was just going to try to delete my ill-advised comment.
Boah Sie sind ein krasser lehrer.
I loved German language but because you I love it much.
keep going
thanks alot
Danke für das krasse Kompliment :D