Hacker News Reader

Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

German: "verstehen" (an "odd" compound of ver+stehen, note that ver- doesn't really carry meaning by itself and only exists as a prefix), which could be understood as standing on/around(?) something. Then we have "begreifen" which is a fairly direct equivalent of "to grasp".

View on HN

There alot of those "are they necessary?" prefixes around. But isn't "ver" the same as "for", which I imagine is the same as "pro" from latin. Meaning either "before" or "causing" or "facilitating" or similar.

No, not really. It is used in many, many words, with no obvious intrinsic meaning of the prefix itself (and sometimes it's pretty much just redundant), although some clusters of meaning can be made out (often ver- signifies something negative or grave, for example).

verstehen, vergehen (active), vergehen (passive), verdammen, verabreden, verfahren, verlaufen, verfestigen, verändern, verallgemeinern, veranschaulichen, veranlassen (ver+an+lassen), verlassen, verärgern, verarmen, verbiegen, verdrehen, ...

I can't explain it well, but I somewhat have the feeling that "ver" also mostly indicates an irrevocable change. All of the words you listed can be used as a status for current conditions. The best example is probably "versterben".

It's hard to grasp, but I think "ver" has some subliminal meaning. The "ver" words feel different than their synonyms.

Out of curiosity I looked it up and Duden actually has a page on it [1].

It can be broken down to 8 different cases according to Duden and there is actually some logic behind it (though not the best and most consistent :D).

[1] https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/ver_

That is correct (causing or facilitating, in this case).

The (I think most common) word for 'understand' in Japanese translates to something like 'it resolved for me'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com