Gers gerskje

Have you ever considered that grass resembles grazing? Or have you ever noticed that the Dutch grazen is an exceptional word? The same applies to Frisian gers and gerskje. And how green exactly is the grass on the other side of the West Germanic fence?

Sounds like...
We generally take words for granted. Of course, it is impossible to think extensively about every word in a text. It is therefore often in more or less exceptional situations that a word suddenly stands out, for example when you look up a translation. The latter happened to me a while back when I publiced my Frisian poem In miel on this site and I, after a request, decided to add a translation into Dutch (on the Dutch page that is - if you choose to read in English, the translation is in English too, off course). I started translating and only then, because of the similarity between gers and gerskje, did I notice that there is a link between gras and grazen, just as between grass and grazing. Only then - and that's quite strange, because when I wrote the poem, I had already been very conscious of the choice of words. And with gers and gerskje you nearly have to do your best to nót see or hear the similarity...

Grazing Highland cattle

Gerskje and weidzje
Almost all my life I have lived in areas where animals ran in pastures. (By the way, when I think of pastures, I almost automatically think of cows. That word comes to mind immediately – is primed, as linguists call it – when I think of pastures. Only after do I realize that there are other animals that run in pastures as well. While, now that I have paid attention to it, it appears that around where I live mainly sheep are kept.) Those animals eat the grass and that is what we call grazing. When those animals are sent into the pastures by the farmer to eat the grass on it, the farmer lets them graze. In Frisian there are two different words for this: 'let the cattle graze' is 'it fee weidzje litte' and 'the cows are grazing' is translated as ‘de kij rinne te gerskjen’. In Dutch we also have grazen as well as weiden. According to my 'Van Dale Medium Dutch Dictionary' there is not really a difference in meaning between them. On the other hand a distinction ís made on etymologiebank.nl: behind grazen it says 'eating grass' in brackets and behind weiden it says 'let graze'. If you put that in a diagram, completed with the situation in German and English, this is what I get:

	German	English	Frisian	Dutch
Eating grass	weiden, grasen	graze, be at pasture	gerskje	grazen (weiden)
Let eat grass	weiden, grasen	(lead out to) pasture	weidzje	(laten) grazen, weiden

Gras and weide
Grazen comes from gras and weiden seems related to wei(de). Therefore I also put those words together in the four West Germanic languages:

	German	English	Frisian	Dutch
The crop	Gras	grass	gers	gras
Piece of grassland	Weide	pasture, grasslands, grazing (land)	greide	wei(de), weiland

To keep it short, I have put 'piece of grassland' in my table, but that's actually not specific enough for German and English, because a distinction is made between 'grassland for grazing' and 'hayland' in those languages. Since weiland seems to mean ‘land om te weiden’ (land to graze) and hooiland ‘land om te hooien’ (land to hay), I think that distinction is also made in Dutch, strictly speaking, but that many people call all grasslands weiland, out of ease or ignorance (including the undersigned). And then about the Frisian language: why does that language have the word weidzje, but is a meadow called greide? I suspect - and unfortunately I have no source to check it - that this has to do with the fact that wei is the Frisian word for 'road', and using greide can prevent misunderstandings. According to the EWN, the term weide was used in New Frisian (after 1550) in the meaning 'place where one lets the cattle search for food'. In my little 'Prisma dictionary Frisian-Dutch' from 2007 however, weide can only be found in the meaning 'wagon freight'.

Grassen
Enough for now about the origin of the words, because something else struck me, and I would also like to mention that here. Both Dutch grazen and Frisian gerskje fall out of tune within their own language. Why isn't it grassen in Dutch? As far as I have been able to think of, besides gras there is no other noun on -as a verb on -azen is derived from. From gas gassen is derived, not gazen; from las lassen is derived, not lazen. And the other way around I can't think of verbs on -azen that are derived from a noun on -as. Grassen is of course the plural of gras; perhaps grazen also arose from a need for distinction, although I do not find that very likely.

Then Frisian: why isn't it gersje? The 'distinction with the plural form'-argument does not apply here anyway. In the case of gersje, it would rather be a diminutive ('little grass'), but that does not seem like an existing word to me. Now my vocabulary of Frisian is somewhat less than that of Dutch, so it is more likely that I will overlook something, but I have only been able to find one other Frisian verb on -erskje and that is terskje (threshing). Only with that word the 'k' is already in the first part: 'threshing floor' is tersk-flier, and not ters-flier.

I can only think of two reasons for the deviation of both grazen and gerskje. The first is that it has something to do with the pronunciation. Especially with gerskje I can imagine that it is easier to form than gersje, since gers already has a j-sound in it (something like gjê's). The second and perhaps most likely reason is that they are very old words. I quote the EWN (in my own translation): “A conclusive Indo-European etymology cannot be given, and partly in view of the limited geographical spread gras (grass), groeien (to grow) and groen (green) probably are substrate words.” Simply put: probably the words gras, groeien and groen existed even before Indo-European came to the area that is known today as The Netherlands, and so it is not easy to find out how those words originated. Long before man started writing down words, the grass was already green and there was grazing. Why people used those sounds to indicate that, may remain a mystery for ever.