er- produces verbs with an accusative object, and suggests going through to the final
consequence of an action:jmdn. ermutigen ‘to encourage/cheer up sb.’
eine Lohnerhöhung erstreiken ‘to get a wage increase by striking’
jmdn. erschießen ‘to shoot a person dead’miss- ‘wrong’misshandeln ‘to maltreat’
missverstehen ‘to misunderstand’ver- (sometimes ending in -ern) can form verbs from nouns and adjectives with a
variety of meanings, usually denoting some kind of process:der Stein ‘stone’ > versteinern ‘turn to stone/ossify’
die Ursache ‘cause’ > verursachen ‘to cause’ (with a negative consequence)
tief ‘deep’ > vertiefen ‘to deepen’
groß ‘large’ > größer ‘larger’ > vergrößern ‘to enlarge’ver- sometimes marks the process as a negative one:jmdn. verleiten ‘to lead sb. astray’
verkommen ‘to go to ruin’
etw. verlernen ‘to forget sth. you have learnt’sich ver- ‘make a mistake’sich versprechen ‘to make a slip of the tongue’
sich verirren ‘to stray/get lost’
sich vertun ‘to make an error’zer- ‘into small pieces’etw. zertreten ‘to break sth. by standing on it’
etw. zerlegen ‘to disassemble carefully/analyse sth.’57.3 Prefixes which can be separable or inseparable
See 36.3 (p. 85).
durch- ‘through’jmdn./etw. durchschauen ‘to see through/not be fooled by sb. or sth.’
durch etw. durch*schauen ‘to look through sth.’hinter- ‘behind’ (nearly always inseparable verbs)etw.irgendwo hinterlegen ‘to deposit sth. somewhere for safe keeping’über- ‘over, across/too much/do again’etw. oder jmdn. über*setzen ‘to ferry sb. or sth. across’
etw. übersetzen ‘to translate sth.’
etw. oder jmdn. überschätzen ‘to overestimate sb. or sth.’
etw. überarbeiten ‘to rework sth.’57
WORD STRUCTURE/FORMATION