Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Word of the Day

Ursprache
 \ OOR-shprah-khuh; German OOR-shprah-khuh \, noun;  
1.a hypothetically reconstructed parent language, as Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of the Germanic languages.

Quotes:
He might have been speaking Ursprache , for all that I understood. I was firmly in the present, watching the starlings cavort over and under the telegraph wires and the wind shimmer the young leaves into a muzzy Monet.
-- Will Self, "My Idea of Fun ," 1993

Kabbalists, Hermetics, Hasidic students of the Torah and the Talmud tried to reconstitute the Old Speech, the Ursprache , from these lost fragments.
-- A. S. Byatt, "Babel Tower," 1996

Origin:
Ursprache  came to Enlgish in the 20th century from the German prefix ur-  meaning "earliest, original" and Sprache  meaning "speech."

Dictionary.com