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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

> Zersiedlung is the Swiss-German term for urban sprawl

That is perhaps a more interesting word than Verdichtung.

Zer is a prefix that gives a destructive meaning to the base word. Teil is piece. Teilen is to share. Zerteilen is to break into pieces. Druck is pressure. Drücken is to push. Zerdrücken is to crush.

Siedlung means settlement.

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Interesting, zer- seems to be similar to Slavic raz- somewhat.

In Russian: davit - press, razdavit - to crush.

Siedlung corresponds to Russian selenie "settlement". Zersiedlung appears to correspond to "rasselenie" (morphologically) and it means more like settlement as a dispersion, movement from a single point in different outward directions.

So I suspect zer- doesn't mean destruction per se, it's just that destruction often involves this movement of parts in outward directions from an original center, which explains the frequent association of zer- with destruction.

My impression is that German prefixes don't have such well-defined meanings that a new word created with one automatically has an unambiguous definition relative to the base word. There seem to be parallels with raz- but I'm not sure if they have a common root.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o...

It’s not always destructive as in “to crush”, it can also lend an air of diffusion, dispersion, fraying at the edges, which is perhaps closer to the idea of “sprawl”. I’m not Swiss, so it could be different there, and I can’t speak to how common “Zersiedlung” is in Switzerland. In Germany I would say it’s probably strictly a governmental/admin term of art, if anything.

In my German-speaking opinion, Zersiedlung is more about destruction of landscape than about fraying of settlements. You don't say that a village is zersiedelt, you do say that a landscape is zersiedelt.

You are right. "Zersiedlung" is a term of art in land-use and development planning to describe the undirected expansion of settlements into rural areas. I happen to work in the periphery of planning and approval and the term comes up quite often. The English equivalent would be the mentioned "suburban sprawl".

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