Ethnology and fieldwork

Die Sippe is the oldest word on this list, and English still carries a piece of it. In the field it names a group that traces its descent to a shared ancestor, often one too distant for anybody to name, and that holds land, settles quarrels and decides whom one may marry. The word goes back to a Germanic root for kinship: Gothic had sibja, Old High German sippa and Old English sibb, which meant relationship and peace at once — the peace that holds between people who owe each other something. English let the noun fall away and kept it in « sibling », an old word revived about a century ago for a brother or a sister. Everyday German is less solemn: die ganze Sippe is the whole tribe of relatives arriving at once, and die Sippenhaft, punishing a family for what one member did, still carries the weight of the Nazi years.