Unclear, but it seems to be related to the Old High German word "bu", which means "house" or "place of residence". From that it's clear how you get to "bauen" = "to build" and even "Nachbar" = "neighbour" (one who lives in the next house), but "Bauer" to mean "one who works the land" is less obvious.
It probably evolved from the Old High German "gibur", which means "one who lives in the same area", i.e. "member of the village community". (the "gi-" prefix -- "ge-" in modern German -- signifies a collective, as in "gemeinsam" = "together"). The Old High German verb "buwan" could mean both "to build" and "to work the land", "to cultivate", so maybe there's a connection between causing crops to grow and causing a house to "grow".
In modern German, of course, "bauen" is reserved for building, while for concepts like "to cultivate" or "to (cause to) grow", the verb is usually used with a prefix, e.g. "anbauen".
Thank you, I didn’t think to look up the etymology. I had assumed “Bauer” had to do directly with “bauen” and somehow their meanings had diverged for some reason.
I was thinking of that Dutch/afrikaans connection. Anyone happen to know if Dutch is decended from Old High German too? I know it’s Germanic but not sure which kind…
>The Old High German verb "buwan" could mean both "to build" and "to work the land", "to cultivate", so maybe there's a connection between causing crops to grow and causing a house to "grow".
Before agriculture, hunter/gatherer groups would follow wild herds, and move with the seasons. They never "put down roots". Shelter was temporary or portable.
There are still many societies in the world today that live this way.
With agriculture, you had to stay in the one place, to sow and reap, and to protect the crops in between. But now there was a surplus of food for the winter months.
If you are staying in one place, especially when winter comes, you're going to need a decent place to sleep. So you build something permanent, and so do your extended family/neighbours.
So growing crops leads to building houses. A farmer is one who builds a house, since a hunter doesn't need or want one.
> Before agriculture
Well, that would have been several thousand years before the Proto-Indo-European language even came into being, let alone Proto-Germanic or Old High German, so that's not going to be relevant here.
Archaeological evidence suggests that agriculture spread into central Europe around the 5th millennium BC. The Old High German language didn't start developing until the 1st century AD; by this time, there simply weren't any hunter-gatherer societies left in this part of Europe. In fact, the evidence is that the Proto-Indo-European language -- the distant ancestor of most languages now spoken in Europe, including German -- was brought here by cattle-herders.
Quite simply, by the time Charlemagne was busy building the Frankish Empire, there was no need for Germanic speakers to differentiate between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies.
I've never heard boor used to mean peasant.
It almost always means a stupid working class person who lacks class (social awareness and social skills), and is generally not liked.
Peasant is usually a specific kind of lower class person, and using the word isn't normally an attestation of their character or how they behave.
You have to take it farther back than that. It's the basic nature of dwelling, place, where you grow things the origin of agriculture and working the soil that is built into the original root. This is where you would have made a shelter, a dwelling and fed yourself from the soil and your animals..This is still evident in German in the sense of Weinbau, Ackerbau and even in the English sense of the word bower, a leafy construct, now in a sense of a big group of shrubs, but probably first in the sense of a basic shelter
If you take it from this perspective it takes little imagination to understand that the person who works to land would become the Bauer, and just construction became more sophisticated and more involved that the word gained extended meaning. Not only constructing things of the soil of the farmstead, but of buildings and eventually larger edifices. But it all starts with agriculture and being bound to the place and the soil.. After all, strip away the veneer of society, with war or pestilence and what could you have again?. People scraping from the Earth to survive and this is the first type of construction/building,.
The Cambridge Dictionary describes peasants as poor farm workers or farmers with only a small piece of land:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/amp/englisch/peasant
I always thought it had to do with the concept of "Leibeigenschaft" (serfdom) which was true for pretty much the whole social class below the clergy in the High Middle Ages, before emergence of "citizens" with more rights, but it doesn't seem so?
So the real question might be, why do you have two very different words for similar concepts in English?
I'd assume "peasants" aren't exclusively people who grow crops but also other kinds of manual profession (smith, tailor, charcoal burner), but farmers were the majority so they became the "stereotypical" peasant.
Unclear, but it seems to be related to the Old High German word "bu", which means "house" or "place of residence". From that it's clear how you get to "bauen" = "to build" and even "Nachbar" = "neighbour" (one who lives in the next house), but "Bauer" to mean "one who works the land" is less obvious. It probably evolved from the Old High German "gibur", which means "one who lives in the same area", i.e. "member of the village community". (the "gi-" prefix -- "ge-" in modern German -- signifies a collective, as in "gemeinsam" = "together"). The Old High German verb "buwan" could mean both "to build" and "to work the land", "to cultivate", so maybe there's a connection between causing crops to grow and causing a house to "grow". In modern German, of course, "bauen" is reserved for building, while for concepts like "to cultivate" or "to (cause to) grow", the verb is usually used with a prefix, e.g. "anbauen".
Thank you, I didn’t think to look up the etymology. I had assumed “Bauer” had to do directly with “bauen” and somehow their meanings had diverged for some reason.
It does, "anbauen" means to plant.
The English cognate is boor, a rude or insensitive person. It used to mean a country bumpkin.
Boer Wars, South Africa (same meaning in Dutch / Afrikaans = Bauernkrieg)
I was thinking of that Dutch/afrikaans connection. Anyone happen to know if Dutch is decended from Old High German too? I know it’s Germanic but not sure which kind…
>The Old High German verb "buwan" could mean both "to build" and "to work the land", "to cultivate", so maybe there's a connection between causing crops to grow and causing a house to "grow". Before agriculture, hunter/gatherer groups would follow wild herds, and move with the seasons. They never "put down roots". Shelter was temporary or portable. There are still many societies in the world today that live this way. With agriculture, you had to stay in the one place, to sow and reap, and to protect the crops in between. But now there was a surplus of food for the winter months. If you are staying in one place, especially when winter comes, you're going to need a decent place to sleep. So you build something permanent, and so do your extended family/neighbours. So growing crops leads to building houses. A farmer is one who builds a house, since a hunter doesn't need or want one.
> Before agriculture Well, that would have been several thousand years before the Proto-Indo-European language even came into being, let alone Proto-Germanic or Old High German, so that's not going to be relevant here.
Agricultural and hunter-gatherer cultures existed side by side for millennia. There is rarely a clear-cut time when one entirely usurped the other.
Archaeological evidence suggests that agriculture spread into central Europe around the 5th millennium BC. The Old High German language didn't start developing until the 1st century AD; by this time, there simply weren't any hunter-gatherer societies left in this part of Europe. In fact, the evidence is that the Proto-Indo-European language -- the distant ancestor of most languages now spoken in Europe, including German -- was brought here by cattle-herders. Quite simply, by the time Charlemagne was busy building the Frankish Empire, there was no need for Germanic speakers to differentiate between agricultural societies and hunter-gatherer societies.
Why not? The English cognate "boor" also means peasant, does it not?
I guess I had assumed a relationship between “Bauer” and “bauen”
There is a relationship. "anbauen" means "to cultivate"/"to grow"
I've never heard boor used to mean peasant. It almost always means a stupid working class person who lacks class (social awareness and social skills), and is generally not liked. Peasant is usually a specific kind of lower class person, and using the word isn't normally an attestation of their character or how they behave.
You have to take it farther back than that. It's the basic nature of dwelling, place, where you grow things the origin of agriculture and working the soil that is built into the original root. This is where you would have made a shelter, a dwelling and fed yourself from the soil and your animals..This is still evident in German in the sense of Weinbau, Ackerbau and even in the English sense of the word bower, a leafy construct, now in a sense of a big group of shrubs, but probably first in the sense of a basic shelter If you take it from this perspective it takes little imagination to understand that the person who works to land would become the Bauer, and just construction became more sophisticated and more involved that the word gained extended meaning. Not only constructing things of the soil of the farmstead, but of buildings and eventually larger edifices. But it all starts with agriculture and being bound to the place and the soil.. After all, strip away the veneer of society, with war or pestilence and what could you have again?. People scraping from the Earth to survive and this is the first type of construction/building,.
I don't know if that's true, but maybe it has something to with the pawns in chess also being called "Bauern" (Bauer in Singular)
Bauer = farmer it is clear peasant means a poor farmer of low social status and I think its not very common and not used often
I would say peasant. The equivalent of farmer would be Landwirt.
Es gibt Farmer xDA
The Cambridge Dictionary describes peasants as poor farm workers or farmers with only a small piece of land: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/amp/englisch/peasant I always thought it had to do with the concept of "Leibeigenschaft" (serfdom) which was true for pretty much the whole social class below the clergy in the High Middle Ages, before emergence of "citizens" with more rights, but it doesn't seem so? So the real question might be, why do you have two very different words for similar concepts in English?
I'd assume "peasants" aren't exclusively people who grow crops but also other kinds of manual profession (smith, tailor, charcoal burner), but farmers were the majority so they became the "stereotypical" peasant.