Talking to my wife Stephanie last night, we realized that “entrepreneur” literally means “between-taker” in French.
And Stephanie pointed out something interesting: the German word for entrepreneur is Unternehmer – literally “below-taker” (or “undertaker”).
So the French take between and the Germans take below.
I wonder if there’s a language which uses “above-taker” to mean entrepreneur?
Posted on 4 December 2009
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In French, entreprendre is a verb, just like “to undertake” in English… Actually, if English did not borrow the word entrepreneur, I guess they should simply have said “undertaker”. It would have made sense to me. But that word probably already exists or doesn’t sound sophisticated enough
I’m not aware of a language that uses “overtaker” though… well maybe conquistador in Spanish
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Good point, English uses “under-take” as well.
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The German “Unternehmer” is from the verb “unternehmen” (German for under-take, venture etc.).
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Receivers can be considered as undertakers as well
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Well, “unter” in German can mean “among” or “in between” too.
That’s my nitpick of today
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Oh, I didn’t realize that. That makes my post make no sense anymore.
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No no, it’s still thought provoking and interesting.
Big-Gs new dict has more: http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=de|en&q=unter&hl=en
I guess German is frustratingly complex in certain cases ..
I just hope you still enjoy your time in Munich. -
Not surprisingly given the relatedness of the languages, “ondernemer” in Dutch is like “Unternehmer” in German.
English of course has “undertaking”.
“onder” (like “unter”) can indeed mean “among” in Dutch as well though that definitely not be the first meaning one would think of. It pops up in phrases like “life among the natives” and such.
Which original meaning the “onder” in “ondernemen” (“to undertake”) refers to I don’t know.
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Well, if you entreprendre well, you’ll hopefully surprendre people too, right?
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For what it’s worth, English has “overtake,” as well, which is roughly “above-take” (paralleling the “undertake” == “below-take” comparison).
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Not much success with finding a language with “overtakers”, but in Estonian the literal translation of entrepreneur means “advance-” or “forth-taker”.
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So is a between-taker a middle-man?
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In Bulgarian, the word is “???????????”, which literary means “before taker”.
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According to the Hungarian Etimology Dictionary (ISBN 963 7094 01 6), in Hungarian, “vállalkozó” (1883) is the only right word for entrepreneur.
It comes from the root váll (1372), meaning shoulder, so vállal (1603) literally stands for “take something on your shoulder” (vállal[koz(ik)] = he/she undertakes), …like Atlas with the Globe
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doesn’t undertaker mean funeral director?
btw in greek we use ?????????????? (epihirimatias) from ??? (on/above) and ???? (hand) so we are almost there
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In Chinese?entrepreneur is ????”?”have two part?and the “?(human,people)” is on the above? Maybe this is an answer.
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English also has ‘abovetaker’ but it is called overtaker. And it doesn’t mean entrepreneur of course.
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Me again,
in German “übernehmen” can mean “to acquire/ absorb”, like Oracle did Sun.
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