Lauf

To a speaker of English, the German root Lauf feels immediately familiar, like an old friend who speaks with a slightly different accent. It is, of course, a cousin to our own verb “to leap,” both coming from an ancient word for running or jumping. In German, however, this sense of motion has leapt far beyond the physical act. The German mind sees a Lauf, a run, not just in a marathon but in the very unfolding of time. A career is a Laufbahn, the track one runs in life. The progress of a disease is its Krankheitsverlauf, its “sickness-run.” Even a legal contract has a Laufzeit, a “run-time” or duration. English does something similar with the word "course," which we get from Latin currere, "to run." We speak of the "course of a river" or the "course of a lifetime," but we stop there. German keeps building. Where we see a sequence of events, German often sees a path being run from start to finish, whether it’s the flow of a game, Spielverlauf, or the intricate steps of an exercise, the Übungsablauf. It is a language that perceives life itself as a kind of dynamic forward movement, a story told in footsteps.