Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "ortschaft" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "ortschaft" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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Would you use this term to refer to an region where there were no people living or is there always some sense of community? Does the word express a kind of smallness?
Also i was looking if you had an entry on -schaft as most of the words i can think of have a sense of community (Leidenschaft seems to be a an exception)
It absolutely has to be a community.
Think of a Landstraße… you can go 100 with your car but as soon as you enter an Ortschaft, you have to drive 50. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a village or small town.
And yes, in practice it does have a sense of smallness because you’d never refer to a city as an Ortschaft except in official legal language (I guess).
Not sure about the community sense of “-schaft”.
I think there are plenty more for which it doesn’t fit.
Interesting topic though, maybe good for an article.
Thanks for the answer.
Yes -the idea of community definitely doesnt work for everything. Perhaps collectivity is a better substitute because its a bit more abstract and general. But even then these are definitely a stretch:
I did think about Wirtschaft- in the sense of „economy „ it could be seen as the collective economic activity amongst a group of people.
Eigenschaft – a thing could be seen as a collection of characteristics.
Landschaft i also thought about as a problematic one. I did wonder if it could be the sum total (collection) of everything within a area (trees , firlds mountains lakes)
Hmmmm just thinking out loud perhaps -schaft has to do with belonging
Did you see my question about the word “ort” by the way?
I don’t think I have.
I get your reasoning, but reading them, I felt like “Nah, that’s not really it.” and instead felt like -schaft has a basis in “doing something”.
I checked the etymology and most “-schaft” endings connect to “schaffen” in the sense of “creation”.
The English relative is -ship, which ties in with “shape”.
I think the theme of “collective” is just a subset of the whole story.
I think I’ll write an article about it.