Hello everyone,
and welcome to our German Word of the Day.
And today we’ll answer the question of what is true.
Because today, we’ll look at the family of
wahr
Some of you probably already know it – wahr is the German word for true.
And even with Cirque-du-Soleil-levels of mind contortion, it’s hard to imagine that those two are related.
And yet, they are!!
The origins of “wahr” and “true”
Nah… I’m just kidding.
They’re NOT related.
But there are quite some surprises in the two families, so if you like to bor…. I mean entertain other people at parties with etymological trivia, this is a gold mine.
True is related to the family of trust and the German trauen and they all go back to the low-key ancient Indo-European root deru– which was about the idea of hard, firm. That’s also where the word tree comes from, by the way. And also Druid, who is someone who gets wisdom and truth from trees… like… a “tree-wit”, if you will ;).
Anyway, the German wahr of course also comes from good old Indo-European but the origin is the root *u̯ēr-, which was about the idea of trust, believe. This root is also the origin of the Slavic words for trusting and believing, like for example the Bulgarian words вярвам (“vjarvam” – to believe) and доверявам (“doverjavam” – to trust).
I find it interesting that the sense of truth grew out from the idea of believing. Kind of fits well in our current times and will even more so in the coming years with all the AI generated pictures and videos. The trend will be that wahr is based on what people BELIEVE to be wahr.
Language is a great example for how these dynamics can change society. Like… you can have the believe that Tisch is in reality das Tisch and calling it der Tisch is because of communism, or the deep state, or patriarchy or whatever you like. And everyone will tell you that it’s not true that it’s das Tisch, BUT if enough people join, then at some point das Tisch will be normalized and maybe even become the norm.
But I digress.
The Latin branch of the family of *uer- with the word verus (true) at the core brought us words like verify or verdict, which is literally “true-speak”.
But the most surprising English relative of all of them is probably very.
Yup… very literally means “truly“.
And if you think about it… it actually kind of looks similar to wahr.
But anyway, enough with the origins – let’s look at wahr in practice.
“wahr” and the crew in action
And we’ll start with examples for wahr itself.
- Mit ZweiBier© wird dein Traum vom Deutschsprechen endlich wahr.
- With TwoBeers© your dream of speaking German will finally come true.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das war zu schön um wahr zu sein.
- That was too good to be true.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Die Magierin der Eichhörnchen hat ihre wahre Macht noch nicht gezeigt.
- The sorceress of the squirrels hasn’t shown her true power yet.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Nur Bares ist Wahres.
- Cash is king.
(lit.: “Only cash is real stuff.”) - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Maria hat gesagt, dass ich zugenommen habe. So eine Frechheit!”
“Naja, da ist was Wahres dran.” - “Maria said that I have gained weight. The brazenness!”
“Well… there is a bit of truth in there.
(lit.: “something true”) - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
As you can see, that’s pretty straightforward.
But there are two differences we should note.
The first one is that wahr is NOT true in the sense of being true to someone or true to your word.
The German word for that is treu.
Wahr is purely about reality.
And the other difference is with regards to this common English phrasing
- That’s true.
This CAN be translated with wahr…
- Das ist wahr.
… but by far the more common way to express this is using the verb stimmen.
- That is true.
- Das stimmt.
wahr is not wrong here, but it sounds maybe a bit fancy or “big” for mundane everyday contexts.
Anyway, all in all, wahr is pretty straight forward to use and the same goes for its noun die Wahrheit.
Which is the truth. Or also the reality sometimes.
- “Du hast mein Bier getrunken, oder? Sag mir die Wahrheit!”
“Viele Wahrheiten es gibt, junger Padawan.” - “You drank my beer, didn’t you? Tell me the truth!”
“Many truths there are, young Padawan. - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Auch wenn sie niedlich aussehen – Einhörner sind in Wahrheit boshafte Fleischfresser und ein Fluch für jeden Wald.
- Even though they look cute – in reality, unicorns are vicious carnivores and a bane of any forest.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Der Präsident hat bewusst die Unwahrheit gesagt.
- The president purposefully lied.
Lit.: “The president consciously said the un-truth.”
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And there are several other relatives that revolve around the meaning of true, and I think you could get all of them from context pretty much.
- “Ich sehe Teller, viele Teller”, sagt die Wahrsagerin zu Thomas.
- “I see plates, many plates.”, the fortune teller tells Thomas.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das war wahrlich ein langweiliger Film.
- That truly was a boring movie.
(“wahrlich” sounds a bit theatrical) - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Mit Ihrer Unterschrift bestätigen Sie, dass Sie alle Fragen wahrheitsgemäß beantwortet haben.
- By signing/with your signature you confirm that you’ve answered all questions truthfully.
lit.: “according to truth”
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
The only one that might not be that obvious is wahrscheinlich. Which is arguably also the most important one, because it’s the German word for probably.
Do you have an idea how the meaning makes sense :)?
Scheinen by itself (we’ve talked about it in a separate article) can mean to shine but also to seem. So taken literally wahrscheinlich means “true-seem-ly“. Or “seems to be true”. Now, that totally could go in a direction of deceiving but in the case of wahrscheinlich, it’s really just about that something looks like it’s the case and that’s really not all that far from the idea of probably… both are “approximating” something.
Oh man, that last paragraph sounded really complicated :D. I hope you’re not too confused now.
If you are, just ignore it. I think if I come back to this in like a year, it’ll probably not make sense to me either.
But anyway, let’s do a couple of examples for wahrscheinlich.
- “Warum ist Thomas so sauer?”
“Wahrscheinlich weil Maria gesagt hat, dass er zugenommen hat.” - “Why is Thomas so angry?”
“Probably because Maria said that he gained weight.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Wie wahrscheinlich ist es, im Zauberwald von einem Einhorn beleidigt zu werden. ”
“Sehr, du Opfer!” - “How likely is it /what is the probability to be insulted by a unicorn in the magical forest. ”
“Very, you moron!” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And let’s also do a couple for its counterpart unwahrscheinlich. Which can mean improbable, but it’s also sometimes used as an intensifier.
- “Wird deine Suppe lecker?”
“Das ist unwahrscheinlich.“ - “Will your soup be tasty?”
“That is unlikely/improbable.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Das war unwahrscheinlich teuer.
- That is incredibly expensive.
(this use is not super common, but does occur)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And then, there’s also the noun die Wahrscheinlichkeit (the probability).
- Die Wahrscheinlichkeit, solche Deutsch-Beispiele ohne zu spucken auszusprechen, ist nicht sehr hoch.
- The probability of saying such examples of German without spitting is not very high.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
… and some some really long and fun compounds like die Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung or die Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichtefunktion (probability density function) which secured me an ABSOLUTELY EPIC win at Scrabble recently.
In case you’re wondering… German Scrabble has a six feet board and you’re using 42 letters at a time.
Nah… That was unwahr, of course :). German scrabble doesn’t look any differently.
What’s wahr though is that there are plenty more cool words with wahr in German, and the sad truth about those is… that we’ll look at them next time. And by next I mean some other time.
The thing is, there are actually quite a few more related words, especially verbs in that family and they’re kind of all over the place, in terms of meaning. And while writing I felt like things were getting more and more disjointed. So I decided to give the words today the space they deserve because they’re really important.
So yeah, short but sweet for this week :).
As always, if you want to recap what we did, you can take the little quiz I have prepared for you.
And of course, if you have any questions or suggestions just leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it, have a great week and see you next time!
** vocab **
wahr = true
unwahr = untrue
wahrlich = truly (rare)
die Wahrheit = the truth
die Halbwahrheit = the half truth
die Unwahrheit = the non-truth
wahrheitsgemäß = according to truth
wahrscheinlich = probably, probably
unwahrscheinlich = unlikely; incredibly (not too common)
die Wahrscheinlichkeit = the probability
die Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung = probability calculus
yay it’s actually fascinating how deeply modern languages connected via previously existed Indo-European; wahrscheinlich can be transalted to Russian super accurately as вероятно, which shares a root with верный whar and so on; love this etymology stuff; danke :)
Thank you for this post and Thank you for the free subscription. I really appreciate it and I promise when i start working I will pay this back to help other people use the website.
Hello to Emanuel and anyone reading this comment.
I gotta thank the anonymous ones who sponsored me and I want you to know that this means a world to me. best wishes to you X
Thank you Senior Members for sponsoring my learning, great appreciation :-)
Great lesson. I always learn so much from them.
Hi guys, thank you to the kind strangers who sponsored my membership :)
This made me laugh so much: “Falls Sie sich fragen… Deutsches Scrabble hat ein sechs Fuß langes Brett und Sie verwenden 42 Buchstaben gleichzeitig.”
It’s funny cause it’s true!
Have I ever mentioned that my mom actually has German Scrabble? It’s a real thing, and at least our version has the same sized board as the English original. :)
I thought “stimmt” was the german word for truth. (in reading about the german language I always saw that). But after I looked it up I found that stimmt means “is correct”. So I learned something new today.
Thanks.
But keep using it for “That’s true.” – it’s the more idiomatic choice :)
Too warm to ski and to rainy to hang out… the whole weekend…
but Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichtefunktion made my day
Thank you
My two cents: in Italian you can translate wahrscheinlich as verosimilmente which literally means something like true-seemingly
Never heard that one, but it seems to be the counterpart of “vraisamblable” which a commenter from France mentioned.
Somehow, “verosimilmente” looks and feels kind of clunky for Italian.
…and verisimilitude in English, which has a pretty strong whiff of Latin about it. (And no, you wouldn’t be likely to drop that into many casual conversations.)
Spelling bee material.
Ah yes, I read that comment
Hahaha, why clunky?
That’s a thing you can do in German but not in Italian. Verosimilmente is an adverb and verosimile is the adjective
I don’t know… it feels like bending into a prezel, but as a word.
And Verosimilmente truthfully seems like English via Latin verisimilitude.
Yay, I aced the quiz today! But my head almost exploded with the second question… :D
Hah, mine did too when I tried to come up with it :). Glückwunsch für 100%!!
Hallo lieber Emmanuel ,
Vielen Dank für diesen schönen Artikel .
Ich möchte etwas dazu hinzufügen . Das Wort ” Wahrscheinlichkeit ” kommt aus Latein . Ausserdem sagt man auf Französich ” vraisemblable”, also wahrscheinlich. Letztere ist aus Latein übersetz.
Ich habe eine grammtikale Frage . Ist es sehr umgänglich die subtanzivierte adjecktive im Deutsch, wie in diese Redewendung
” Nur Bares ist Wahres .” benutzen ?
Im Voraus, herzlichen Dank.
Oh, du meinst “wahrscheinlich” ist eine der vielen “wörtlichen” Übersetzungen. Ja, das kann sein.
Und ja, wir benutzen diese Adjektivnomen ziemlich oft :)
Hello,
The truth this time is that straightforward is a single word :)
Thanks for yet another very useful article!
Bis bald
Ugh… for like the 50th time I make this mistake!!
Maybe next time just write that I made THE mistake… maybe I’ll remember then and that’ll then carry over to when I actually type it :).
“unicorns are viscous carnivores and a bane for any forest.”
Dear Emanuel, if they were really that viscous, they would be herbivores, since plants don’t move, and animals could run to escape the “viscous” unicorns.
viscous = zähflüssig.
Sie sind bösartig = vicious.
Vielen Dank wie immer für deine wunderbaren Artikel…. Entschuldige, dass ich dich von Zeit zu Zeit aufziehe, aber ich weiß, dass du einen großartigen Sinn für Humor hast!
ok and now a well-intentioned comment: “bane” is so 19th-century. It survives in English (in Canada at least) mostly in the phrase “X is the bane OF Y”. The cliche version is “he is the bane of my existence”, usually said by a Maria of a Thomas.
However, a modern Maria is more likely to say that Thomas is a pain in the ass, than the bane of her existence. Although when Maria gets together with some society ladies for tea and biscuits at the University Women’s Club Senior Common Room, she might say that Thomas is the bane of her existence, to avoid having one of the society ladies embarrass herself by spitting out her tea if she said “pain in the ass”.
“bane FOR” is unusual, it would be more idiomatic to say bane of any forest, as in “mosquitoes are the bane of northern Canadian camping trips”. (or black flies, or horse flies–we have lots of “banes” in Canada but we rarely call them that.)
Perhaps Emanuel is already aware that “bane” is not exactly everyday english ??It’s quiet common for writers to use words like this for comic effect and so “bane” makes stylistic sense. I found it funny and was impressed by its use rather than thinking it was a misunderstanding of the tone of the word. It works perfectly in this sentence in my opinion. I think the likelihood is someone using the word seriously these days is less likely than using it comically…
I agree with you on “of” being preferable to “for” however.
And well spotted with viscous, i didn’t spot that. Viscous unicorns – quiet an idea – not sure if i could even imagine that…
“Viscous unicorns”… basically the T-1000 but as a unicorn. Truly scary. I hope they never unlock that branch of their skill tree. They’d be OP then.
But for now they’re busy skilling on stuff like extortion and gambling.
Quite vs quiet! They are not synonyms. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Ooouhhhh, shots fired :D!
Haha, I’m aware of the archaic tone, epic of “bane”, but I thought it fits the context well.
Like… you wouldn’t really describe the unicorns as “pain in the ass” for the forest.
I think what makes the sentence sound weird is mainly the “any”. If I had said “the bane of the magical forest” it would have stood out less.
Nice catch on “viscous”. I think I have made this mistake several times already and I just can’t get it to … stick :).
Vicious/viscous is a pretty common mistake for native speakers too. I think a lot of people are going for “viscious” (like “luscious”) and it turns into thick liquid.
Einmal hat Jack Nicholson durch riesige ultraweiße Zähne gebrüllt, “You can’t handle the truth!”
Stimmt noch – aber was hat er wirklich gemeint und wie soll man das dann übersetzen?
Du/Sie/Ihr könnt die Wahrheit nicht verkraften/(v)ertragen/bewältigen?
Eher unwahrscheinlich hat Mark Twain vor 100 Jahren geschrieben: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Wahrhaft dat, Bru
Das wurde mit “vertragen” übersetzt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_LfaoMZm1E
Cool…danke
Was meinst du eigentlich mit “Wahrhaft dat”?
“Dat (would) be ‘Wahrhaft’, bruh…”
(“Dat” == “that”, and you’ll also bump into “dem” == “them/those”, and doubtless you already have “deez” == “these” on board.)
But what’s “wahrhaft” supposed to mean here?
Aah, hmm, das habe ich nicht bemerkt. Ich schätze, dass “wahr” oder “stimmt” anstelle von “wahrhaft” hätte verwendet werden müssen, nicht wahr? ;-)
((‘hätte verwendet werden müssen’: I kinda like that big ol’ lump’o’verbs, in a perverse kind of way. Expanding out why it is what it is (passive, K2, Nebensatz, …), and why everything appears in that order would be quite a fun thing to write, methinks.))
“So, do you have a kink.”
“Yeah… big lumps of verbs at the rear.”
(from my upcoming book “date ideas”)
Yes, “wahrhaft” means “truly” and ONLY “truly”.
File under Minaj à trois.
Alternatively…
(Ich mag…) große Verbenklumpen
und ich kann nicht lügen
true dat (true that)
That’s what I thought, but “wahrhaft” absolutely does not work there.
“Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichtefunktion” ist ein echt schönes Wort. :)
Peak poetry!
Stepping on Elsa’s role again, but the translation on the Warum ist Thomas so sauer? example is off.
In older English, you have the word verily that’s a pretty exact equivalent to wahrlich. I’m not sure you’d use that even ironically nowadays, but you might say something is “a veritable xyz” with the same kind of meaning and tone.
It’s interesting to compare some of the etymological stuff around “truth” vocabulary. In (at least Biblical) Hebrew, the root אמן ‘-m-n covers a lot of that – it’s where the word amen comes from. Etymologically it’s about firmness, certainty, reliability, and the verb for “believe” or “trust” is a causative form of that root, “to make/consider certain/firm.” Even the word that means “thus” (it’s the normal way to say “yes” in modern Hebrew) looks to be related to another word family that has to do with being founded, set in place.
In New Testament (Koine or Hellenistic Common) Greek, “true” is ἀληθός alethos (I think that word family is still the basic vocab for “truth” in modern Greek), apparently meaning etymologically “not concealed,” so that speaking “truthfully” meant speaking with what English historically called candor, openness and sincerity.
I just find sort of the imagination behind concepts like truth a really interesting part of language study.
Me too!!
At some point, people started developing the “concept” if “true” and it’s interesting what “field” they based it on.
I’d love if someone from China or Japan or a country in Africa could chime in and share a bit about how it is in their languages.
Ok I’m not actually from China (i.e. it is not true that I’m from China!) but let me get the fun started. True in the sense of real, genuine (the opposite of false) is 真 (zhen1) – Chinese-German dictionaries indeed translate it as wahr, wirklich, echt. In ancient Chinese the term harks back to something that is true to its nature (i,e, like pure gold) or something that is not an illusion (i.e. an absolute reality or in fact the original nature of humans). The written character itself has within it a component that means “seashell” (貝）which recalls the original meaning of the symbol: precious, valuable. So the etymological journey is that the most precious thing you have is the essential nature of a thing, i.e. the truth about it.
Wow, that’s awesome!! Thank you for chiming in!
Did you use much etymology back when you were learning Chinese?
(For all others: daschles is the author of the first episode of “Your Stories” from a week ago)
Alas no. Unlike German, which can be fun from day one, Chinese is all about delayed gratification- there’s such an incredible mountain of stuff to try to get your mind around at the beginning that fun stuff like etymology gets pushed aside. At least when I was beginning.
Navajo is an interesting one. The word for “truth” has two parts:
t’áá: a particle that can mean “just, only, sort of, quite” or is left untranslated. ‘ is a glottal stop and the accents are a high tone.
‘aaníí: a form of a verb root that means “to be true.” The etymology is unclear. It could come from roots meaning (1) to want, love, have in mind; (2) to say; (3) to be new, fresh; (4) to be joyful; (5) to be the solution for. Navajo doesn’t have tenses, except for the future, but this would be equivalent to the third person present tense in English (it is true).
It’s also part of the word for “law” (beehaz’áanii), which means something fundamental and absolute that has existed since the beginning of time. It’s considered the source of a healthy and meaningful life.
Wow, I was just thinking this morning that I need to look up this word (so I can play 2 truths and a lie), and here is the article I need! Are you reading my mind now? Can you please do your next article on … well, you already know. …
A quick question on ‘probably’ – in English we can use probably on its own (as an adverb i guess), but also as with an adjective, and some in particular are: ‘That is probably true’, and ‘That is probably false’. I’m guessing that wahrscheinlich doesn’t really work in that context. That is, we can say:
Das ist wahrscheinlich/unwahrscheinlich.
Oder: Das ist (un)wahrscheinlich teuer.
But we cannot say: Das ist wahrscheinlich unwahr. ??
Also, one of your examples is: Das wahr unwahrscheinlich teuer.
Should that be ‘war’? Or have I missed something. (To my ears war and wahr sound the same anyway!).
And as a maths geek, I love talking about probability density functions! Can’t wait for your full series on calculus.
Great questions!
You said in your comment that probably is used like an adjective but then you gave two examples for it used as an adverb.
The adjective use looks like this:
This means:
And here, we have “probable” as an adjective.
The closest translation to “This is probably true” is
And of course you can also say
But the more common option people would say is this:
And yes, “war” and “wahr” sound the same to me too :)