Seafaring and the port

The word here with the longest journey behind it is der Lotse, the pilot who boards outside the harbour and takes a ship up the channel. German borrowed it from Dutch loodsman, and Dutch had it from medieval English: a lodesman was a guide, a man who knew the lode, the way. English has since dropped the word and kept its first half only in the lodestar sailors steered by and the lodestone that pointed north. German cut the borrowing down to Lotse, made it a weak noun — den Lotsen, dem Lotsen — and then built on it freely. Lotsen is to guide anyone through anything, a visitor through a building as readily as a freighter past a sandbank, and der Fluglotse is not a pilot at all but the air traffic controller on the ground; the one in the cockpit is der Pilot. The rest of the list runs from the fairway to the cargo papers.