Home: The Term and the Concept from a Linguistic and Settlement-Historical Viewpoint

Everyone knows and understands the word home, although if we were able to X-ray or dissect people’s minds to see the connotations that represent that particular person’s meaning of home, we would probably see a wide range of concepts. The modern word home, hjem, heim, hem etc. must per definitionem be ambiguous, due to the fact that firstly, it denotes not a concrete object but something more abstract, an observation which in fact seems to go far back in history, 1,000, maybe 2,000 years; Secondly, the word has thus lived for thousands of years with the possibility of becoming semantically wider or narrower in different languages. One can only go to oneself and ask for the meaning of home. The semantic core is probably shared with most other people in the same cultural context, however the semantic picture will probably fade out at the edges. What probably comes to mind, is one’s living-house with various “necessities” in the vicinity. A more collective valid meaning we can look up in lexica. If we however for some reason want to use home as an unambiguous term in research, we of course have to give it a precise definition.