Hello everyone,
And welcome to the second episode of Prefix Verb Shorts.
In each episode, we take one inseparable prefix verb, see what it means and more importantly, WHY it means what it means, so that little by little, we build an intuition for the prefixes themselves.
And today, we will take a look at
verstehen
Now you might be like “Oh, boring. We know that one already.”
And yes, most of you know that verstehen means to understand.
The story here isn’t really what it means but WHY it means that.
What is the ver- doing and what does it have to do stehen.
And once you ask yourself that, you might also start to wonder the same for English.
Like… how the hell do we get from under and standing to the idea of, well, understanding.
Most native speakers aren’t even noticing that this is kind of weird. It’s the type of thing you only start asking once you learn another language and you start noticing things about your own.
There is some logic here though, and it’s not even all that twisted.
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Hello,
Some typos:
“have this double meaning because” (have this double meaning is because)
“from more figurative sense of agreeing” (from the more figurative sense of agreeing)
“there might be littles glitches” (there might be little glitches)
Thanks, I love this series :)))
Bis bald!
Not sure by whom but there was an analysis of understanding in the meaning of understanding a concept. “stand” is implying standing and thus pausing, leading to a mental state of understanding. This analysis usually stress the phenomenon that you gotta pause and ponder (stand thus stop) to understand something. You can only understand something if you stop!
The issue is/was indeed lexical, to be sure the distinction between “to stand UNDER” something, whereas in German of course “unterstehen” has a vastly different meaning or lexic than “verstehen”.
Anglophone speakers mired in source language interference struggle with this issue.
That’s all I was trying to say.
A lovely little lesson! Checking out the additional words, then the flashcards and then the comprehension test is a great way to make the information stick.
I still love the little button-quizzes that are interspersed in the explanations – they cause me to slow down and think for a bit – it’s too easy to read quickly and convince myself I’m actually retaining everything.
I really enjoy this as well when writing the article. It makes it more like an actual lesson would be.
Me too!
“Ver-” tends either to show a negative extreme e.g “tun” = to do by performing an action vs. sich VERtun = to make a mistake, a blunder, or, to extend an action such as “stehen” = to stand as opposed to VERstehen, to stand “past” something in the sense of to grasp it in perspective, that is, to comprehend.
English “understand” appears to follow a different root…and a different lexical function while having the meaning of verstehen!
I respect Beowulf and all his greatness, but I’m sticking with Miss Verständnis.
Lol, yeah, good choice. Browulf is fun for game night, but a woman with Verständnis for us is something to cherish.
When I was at university, our Germanistik professor was teaching Beowulf for our course in OE (Old English), later on that semester, moving on to Althochdeutsch.
Not surprisingly, I was able to grasp much of what Walther was writing:-)