Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "bei" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "bei" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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Is there an article that explains the german version of the english preposition “by”?
No, not directly.
Here it is in a nutshell:
“by” in a sense of “made by, origin” – von
“by” in a sense of passing by – vorbei
“by” in a sense of next to, with (stand by my side, …) – an, bei (depending in the exact context)
Happy to answer follow up questions here.
What about by in the sense of ‘how to do something’
Ex. You can turn on the radio by pressing that button.
or
You can support him by providing money.
Oh, nice one!
Either a sentence with “indem” or the preposition “durch” or “mit”.
– Du kannst das Radio anmachen, indem du diesen Knopf drueckst.
– Du kannst das Radio durch Druecken auf diesen Knopf anmachen.
Is there an overarching theme when bei is a prefix?
There’s a sense of adding (Beispiel, beifügen, beilegen etc) which is also present in “beisetzen” (to burry) as a notion of adding to other graves.
And there’s beilegen as in “put away” which is kind of about putting aside.
There are not many verbs with “bei” overall though.
Let me know if you have a question about one of them in particular.
didn’t really understand the second meaning
The phrasing “bei+ m + verb made noun” is fairly common in daily German.
Does that help?
Crystal clear. Thanks a lot this site is saving my german.
Happy to hear that :)