Learn English – Where did prefix exceptions originate

The formation of verbs in many Indo-European languages follows the following rule

    prefix + root verb

Examples

• English incoming, outgoing
• German einkommen (income), ausgehend (outgoing)
• Latin inīre (to come in), exīre (to go out)

German for instance still follows this system very closely and has a small number of ubiquitous prefixes which fall into two categories:

1. The so called separable¹ prefixes (ab- "off", an- "on", auf- "up", aus- "out", ein- "in" etc.), which indicate an ongoing action, a movement or a direction.
2. And the so called inseparable¹ prefixes: (be- (be), ent-, er-, ge-, mis-, ver- and zer-) which indicate a completed action (differentiated according to the type of outcome: neutral, successful, failed...).

The English be- prefix is clearly the same as the German be- and is therefore a remnant of its Germanic ascendancy.

It is actually of the same origin as the verb to be which linguists have traced back, through Proto Germanic to the reconstituted Proto Indo European root *bheu-, *bhu- meaning "to grow", "to turn into" or " to become"².

Ultimately most of the English words starting with a "be-" can be traced back to this notion of "to turn into"³.

The general form is:
   be + [quality]
and the corresponding meaning is:
   to turn into + [quality].

Let's illustrate all this theory with a few simple examples:

• to befriend somebody => to turn somebody into a friend.
• to beget something => to make something supplied, produced.
• to besot somebody (besotted) => to turn somebody into a sot (a dummy).
• to bewitch somebody => to make somebody possessed by a spell.
• to bedazzle somebody => to make him confused (see also bewilder)

These ones are slightly more difficult:

• to behold: the original meaning of to hold (OE healdan, German halten) is to keep. But to keep by actually keeping an eye on, to watch over. => So to behold is to make something watched.
• to bedevil someone => to make someone feel like in Hell.
• to believe something => to make something dear (loved). See also German glauben (ge + lieben) as well as Dutch geloven.
• to belong to someone => to make something go along with somebody.

As usual there are a few exceptions or look-alikes that don't fit into the template

• to behead => sometimes the "be" is categorised as privative but you can also interpret it as "turn into a head (and not much else)". The question being what do you sever: the head or the body ?
• between. It is not a verb. The "be" is akin to "by" and the "tween" part is akin to "two".

But their existence is not sufficient to belie the general theory outlined above.

Usually you can just slap re on the front of a word, without a hyphen, and you will be understood. There’s no need for the term to have made its way into an “authoritative” dictionary, even if there were such a thing.

There are circumstances in which the hyphen is desirable:

• if your new word with re collides with an established “re” word which has a different sense. Two of the words Carlo_R mentions are of this sort: resign and reserve.
• If you want to draw attention to the fact that you are using a “re” word in a different sense than that which would be expected, particularly if you are reverting to the base sense. “D.W.Griffith’s re-construction of the myth of the carpetbagger.”
• If you want to emphasize that you are repeating or reversing an action. “Burns opened an interesting question in 1923; but it has been completely neglected and I want to re-open it now.”

I sometimes intrude a hyphen when the word to which I’m attaching re begins with a vowel, to prevent even momentary confusion; but it’s probably not necessary.