"versprechen" has maybe the most ironic double meaning ever. Today, we'll find out what it means and how those two connect.
'ver' is the most common prefix in German and there seems to be no logic to it. In this article, we'll discover its one core meaning and what we can do with it.
The core idea of the root (according to English sources) was:
ankle
German sources have the meaning for focused on motion and describe it as
twitching with the foot, unrest
In German, it shifted toward a sense of tracking (by foot) and then kept going toward the sense of perceiving.
English doesn’t have many relatives – spur, spoor, spurn.
They haven’t shifted their meaning as much, so they’re still somewhat close to ankle or to a broad sense of twitching.
