As I’ve understood and used the term, to walk means to propel oneself forward on foot in such a way that either foot is touching the ground at all times, and includes narrower terms like stroll, stride, saunter, plod, race-walking The key point is that one foot’s always touching the ground, because otherwise you’d be running, hopping, skipping, or whatever.
So I have this German crossword puzzle app on my phone, and I come to the following clue:
Schnelles, intensives Gehen (Eng), roughly translatable as “fast and intensive walking” (English).
The desired answer in the crossword turns out to be “walking”, although from the clue it sounds more like race walking. So I have to ask if any other native speakers of English are familiar with this narrower usage of the word.
Oddly enough, when I studied German in high school I was taught that gehen = “to walk”; but when I actually traveled over there and spent some time I found that my fellow students generally used the word laufen instead. Laufen normally means “to run” and in certain contexts was used to mean exactly that.
I believe “gehen” is like Spanish “andar”: it resides in a semantic space between the English words “go” and “walk.” In Spanish, if you definitively want to emphasize the “walkiness,” you use a different verb (“caminar”), but if you just want to say “go” in general, you use yet a third verb (“ir”). There really isn’t an English verb that occupies the same semantic range as gehen/andar.
You’ll need to conceptualize Walking not as an English but as a German verb in this meaning (pronounced as in English but inflected as a German verb - indicative present: Ich walke, du walkst, er/sie walkt, wir walken, ihr walkt, sie walken).
Walking is widely understood in Germany as fast, energetic walking for purposes of exercise, often in the specific form of Nordic Walking where you add propulsion by two special poles to also exercise the arms. It is recommended for and practiced by those who are not (yet) fit enough or who carry too much weight to take up running. You’ll see a lot of ladies of a certain age in parks and forests, often with a friend and sometimes in packs or shoals, doing this as their exercise program.
The difference in meaning to the English verb ‘walking’ is understood.
The sport version is just called “walking” or “the walk” here, not “race-walking” (which sounds like something NYPD cops do when they’re profiling on foot.)
Both are cognates of Modern English “go,” right? Which implies there was a more general word for “go” at some point in Old English (perhaps a cognate of German “fahren”? We still say “fare thee well”…).
You might still say “fare thee well” in Kansas, but certainly not over here. Even “farewell” is not in common use outside of poetry.
The most likely place to find ‘fare’ (apart from bus fare etc, and rarely as bill of fare) is in ‘welfare’ which originally was related to happiness, good fortune or prosperity, and has now become a substitute for ‘charity’ which fell out of favour. They probably all come from the original German ‘fahren’.
The exact usage als varies with German dialects: In Swiss German, for example, “gehen” is used exactly as “go” in English, “laufen” means to “go by foot”, and “rennen” means “to run”. “Walken” is a new import and stands for the sport of “nordic walking”
Mops already gave the correct answer on how it was meant in the German crossword.
As it came up several times, I would like to add that Olympic walking or racewalkingin German is simply called “Gehen” (which means “walking/to walk”). So, racewalking was not meant in the crosswords.
Not as part of Gangway, but gang in low Scots means exactly ‘go’. If it appears as such in low Scots, it must be cognate or near cognate with old and middle English.
The etymological dictionary offered by puylkamell above gives
fare (n.)
Old English fær “journey, road, passage, expedition,” strong neuter of faran “to journey” (see fare (v.)); merged with faru “journey, expedition, companions, baggage,” strong fem. of faran. Original sense is obsolete, except in compounds (wayfarer, sea-faring, etc.) Meaning “food provided” is c.1200; that of “conveyance” appears in Scottish early 15c. and led to sense of “payment for passage” (1510s).
gang (n.) Look up gang at Dictionary.com
from Old English gang “a going, journey, way, passage,” and Old Norse gangr “a group of men, a set,” both from Proto-Germanic *gangaz (cognates: Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Danish, Dutch, Old High German, German gang, Old Norse gangr, Gothic gagg “act of going”), from PIE root *ghengh- “to step” (cognates: Sanskrit jangha “shank,” Avestan zanga- “ankle,” Lithuanian zengiu “I stride”). Thus not considered to be related to go.
If you read through the etymologies, the words appear to be related in meaning, but ultimately derive from different roots. ETA: Although another source does say they’re related. I’m only being careful here, because false cognates are not unusual in linguistics and just because two words look similar doesn’t necessarily mean they ultimately derive from the same root. You can’t necessarily say something “must be” or is “obviously” related to another word without digging about a bit in their histories. It’s certainly a plausible conclusion, but worth investigating. In this case, I can’t tell, because there appears to be conflicting info.
In translation, this sounds like the premise of a Monty Python sketch.
[quote=chav type character]
These days the woods are overrun by packs or shoals of ladies of a certain age. It isn’t safe anymore…
I was unaware of this, and it obviously explains the expected answer given the wording of the clue. In English we’d be more likely to say “walking for exercise”, unless that’s otherwise clear from the concept.
My etymological dictionary unhesitatingly relates “go” to “gehen”. It is much more tentative about “gang” saying it is perhaps ultimately related to “go”. Since “gang” is the preterite of “gehen” this surprises me.