To take the “postcard shot” photo of the medieval buildings along the Neckar River Tübingen, you stand on the Neckarbrücke (“Neckar Bridge”). During the Stocherkahnrennen, the boats race down the river in front of those buildings until they reach the bridge. Then, the boats go twice around one of the posts that hold up the bridge. The boats then head back up the other side of the Neckar Island to get to the finish line.

The trickiest part — even for teams that can navigate the rest of the course without difficulty – is that circle around the bridge post. There’s usually a major pileup that happens there, as boats temporarily get stuck trying to do a tight turn around the post in a Stocherkahn, a boat whose design that does not lend itself to  efficient turning.

In the newspaper coverage of the Stocherkahnrennen, that part of the race course is called the Nagelöhr, which translates to the English expression “eye of the needle”.

When I read that word again last Friday, it got me thinking. At first glance, it appears that the word for “eye of the needle” looks like the literal translation would be “ear of the needle”.  Consider,

• German Nagel = English “needle”
• German Ohr = English “ear”
• German hören = English “to hear”

Of course, the word Nagelöhr, “eye of the needle” has an umlaut “ö”, but the German word “to hear” also has the “ö”, so I assumed that somehow the öhr part of Nagelöhr was the same as the word for “ear”. Except, in the dictionary, the word Öhr is defined as “eye”, as in needles and other tools.

But surely, all the words for ear, hearing, and metaphorical “eye” are related, no?

Well, yes and no, as it turns out. Chris looked up the etymology of the words,and discovered that historically speaking, it is indeed the case that Ohr and Öhr both come from the same root that originally just meant “hole”.  Neither word has anything to do — linguistically — with any of the words for hearing.

Of course, I didn’t know that last year, which perhaps contributed to my problems in spelling words related to hearing on my German course tests. You see,  I figured the word for “ear” and the word for “hear” would be related, right? So, I’d always misspell “ear” as Öhr instead of Ohr, and/or misspell “to hear” as höhren or hohren instead of hören. Now I know why I always got those wrong – those words aren’t related, and they aren’t spelled the same at all.

BTW, I’m sure it’s been these kind of erroneous assumptions about language change and historical linguistics that has led to my generally bad spelling all my life. Really.

But I digress. The takeaway language tidbit from today is that there was originally just one word meaning  “hole”,  referring to any kind of opening that something could be put in. In modern German, the word Öhr traces its language ancestry to this original root meaning, and is used to refer to openings in tools, for example the opening in a needle, or in an axe head; both of those openings in English are called “eyes”.

But word for ear in German, Ohr, also traces its roots to the same original word. Which means that in some sense, an ear was originally thought of as just a hole in your head.

I don’t know why, but that strikes me as funny. When looked at that way, the English expression “I need this like I need a hole in the head” actually takes on the opposite  meaning (i.e. something you need versus not need).

And I can also conjecture – but have not yet looked up – that the English word ear is related to the same root as the German word Ohr.

But this begs the question – how come in English the expression is “eye of the needle”, anyway?  In the Wikipedia entry on this expression, there’s speculation that it is because the shape of the opening in a needle is the same as the shape of an eye. Really? I, who can see eyes and faces in almost any inanimate thing if I try hard enough, just don’t see it.

So, we’ll have to come up with another explanation. Now, I could speculate at length and/or make up something that could sound plausible.

But I’m sure you need another folk etymology of the English expression “eye of the needle” like you need a … well…

😉