2023-05-26 19:46:05
That’s not how we worlded: King Marke discovers Tristan and Isolde in a cave, Tristan’s sword between them. Illustration of the poem by Gottfried von Strassburg.
Bild: Getty Images
Bonaventure Ndikung, the director of the House of World Cultures, excels in linguistic creativity. Or, to be more precise, in a creative way: in the past, both English and German actually had a verb for the noun “world”.
Bhen presenting his program, the new director of the House of World Cultures in Berlin, Bonaventure Ndikung, also showed himself to be linguistically creative. To emphasize diversity and design as central motifs of his plans, he asserted that the world was not a noun but a verb. At least in English: “The world is not a noun, but a verb: to unworld, to world, and to reworld.”
In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for “to world”. The verb, which has been shown to be rare and obsolete, is used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to mean “bring into the world”. Occasionally it is revived in poetic language, as in 1973 by WH Auden in his “Address to the Beasts”: “For us who, from the moment / we first are worlded, / lapse into disarray”. From an epic poem about the history of England, printed in 1589, the OED gives two passages for the meaning “to populate”, one of them in a figura etymologica: “that World shall world an Ile”. In the Internet dictionary Wiktionary, the earlier of two documents is from 1996.
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