Thank You!

I want to thank everyone who checked out any or all of the "German Question" articles. As I noted before, I really intended to do, like maybe, a series of six articles about the subject, but once I got going, there was no stopping me, and, like other peoples, the Germans are the sum of their collective history, so I did a basic overview of that history. The series drew thousands of visits to this site from around the world, and I hope some people took away a little knowledge, not only about German history, but about how their own culture and history relates to some of the events in German history. I really enjoyed doing this series.

WORD HISTORY:
Warp-This verb traces back to Indo European "wer," which had the notion of "bend, twist." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "werpanan," which meant "to throw or hurl," apparently because we "bend and twist" our arm when throwing. This then gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "weorpan," with the same basic meaning of "throw, fling, hurl." Now comes a problem. By the 1300s, the meaning "distort, twist out of shape," began to take over. The question is, why? What I mean is, how did English speakers in the 1300s know the word's meaning derived from "twist, bend, turn," if they used it to mean "throw?" So presumably the word must have also retained the "twist, bend" meaning as a secondary meaning all along, with "throw" being the primary meaning up until then. The word then became "werpen," before acquiring the modern spelling. There is also a nautical meaning of "towing a ship with a line;" the notion being of the rope being "thrown" from one point to another. There is an archaic noun form "warp," with the meaning "threads arranged lengthwise in woven fabric." This seems to come from the idea of "throwing the threads" in a particular pattern. It comes from Old Germanic "warp," and was "wearp" in Old English. English "warp" has relatives in the other Germanic languages: German "werfen," which means "to throw, to launch" also used in modern times for a rocket launcher (noun), "Werfer;" Dutch has "werpen"=to throw; Swedish has värpa, with the meaning, "to lay eggs," and the notion of "discharging" is still present. "Apparently" forms of the word have died out in the other Germanic languages, but if anyone knows otherwise, I hope you will post a comment with your knowledge.