An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/lesen
lesen, verb, ‘to gather, glean, read,’ from Middle High German lësen, Old High German lësan, ‘to pick out, pick up, read,’ also ‘to narrate, relate.’ Gothic lisan, galisan, and Anglo-Saxon lesan, simply mean ‘to gather, collect’; from the latter English to lease is derived. So too in earlier Old Icelandic lesa merely signifies ‘to collect, glean.’ There can be no doubt that this was the primary meaning of High German lesen; hence it is probable that the common Teutonic lesan, ‘to gather up,’ is connected with Lithuanian lesù (lèsti), ‘to peck, pick up grains of corn.’ There is no relation between Gothic lisan, ‘to gather,’ and lais, ‘I know,’ laisjan, ‘to teach’ (see lehren, and lernen). The development of the meaning ‘to read’ from ‘to gather’ is indeed analogous to that of Latin lego and Greek λέγω, which the High German significations combine. Yet the state of Old Teutonic culture affords a finer and wider explanation of lesen, ‘legere’; since the modern term Buchstabe, ‘letter,’ is inherited from Old Teutonic times, when runic signs were scratched on separate twigs, the gathering of these twigs, which were strewn for purposes of divination, was equivalent to ‘reading (lesen) the runes.’ Hence Old Teutonic lesan expressed the action described by Tacitus (Germ. 10) as “surculos ter singulos tollit;” in pre-hist. German it also signified “sublatos secundum impressam ante notam interpretatur.” It is worthy of remark too that the Old Teutonic dialects have no common term for ‘to read,’ and this proves that the art was not learnt until the Teutons had separated into the different tribes. It is also certain that runic writing was of foreign, probably of Italian origin. The Goth used the expressions siggwan, ussiggwan, ‘to read,’ the Englishman Anglo-Saxon rœ̂dan, English to read; the former probably signified originally ‘loud delivery,’ the latter ‘to guess the runic characters.’