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Interesting, zer- seems to be similar to Slavic raz- somewhat. In Russian: davit - press, razdavit - to crush. Siedlung corresponds to Russian selenie "settle
by kgeist 10mo ago
Interesting, zer- seems to be similar to Slavic raz- somewhat.
In Russian: davit - press, razdavit - to crush.
Siedlung corresponds to Russian selenie "settlement". Zersiedlung appears to correspond to "rasselenie" (morphologically) and it means more like settlement as a dispersion, movement from a single point in different outward directions.
So I suspect zer- doesn't mean destruction per se, it's just that destruction often involves this movement of parts in outward directions from an original center, which explains the frequent association of zer- with destruction.
- Zak 10mo agoMy impression is that German prefixes don't have such well-defined meanings that a new word created with one automatically has an unambiguous definition relative to the base word. There seem to be parallels with raz- but I'm not sure if they have a common root. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/dw%C3%ADs https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/orz- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o...