Dictionary › verb › ver verb › *ghē- › gehen › vergehen

vergehen

Word type: ver verb
Based on: gehen
Perfect (spoken past): ist vergangen
Preterite (written past): verging

Meanings

1.
to pass, to wither
(Mainly for time, pain and anger, that pass. NOT for you passing time. That's "verbringen". Also used in sense of withering, dying, but it sounds quite epic there.)
How useful:
2.
to go away
("jemandem+Dat vergehen" - for appetite and desire. The person losing it is the indirect object and needs to be included.)
How useful:
3.
to rape, to molest
("sich+Acc vergehen an+Dative" - sounds less "violent" than "vergewaltigen" but its essentially the same. The spoken past is built with "haben" for this one.)
How useful:

Word Family

Root: *ghē-

The core idea of this root was:

going away, disappearing

This is also commonly considered the origin of to go but other relations are not certain.

The English to go is defective in the sense that it doesn’t have its own past tense form. And it hasn’t had one for more than a thousand years. Instead, it uses the form went, which is taken from the verb to wend. It’s unclear, why to go is defective.

German gehen does have its own past form, but according to German etymologist, the cluster of gehen is actually a combination of two families – one being the one of to go and the other being that of the word of English gang, which ironically was originally about making steps.

Yeah… I know… this was already a bit too nerdy. We’re here to learn German, not do science :)

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