[Ads-l] "be-" [Was: Urban legend? Or fact?]

[Dan Goncharoff]

This makes me think of inseparable prefixes in German:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25951/how-does-the-be-prefix-change-the-words-to-which-it-is-applied-how-did-it-co

DanG

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Joel Berson <berson at att.net> wrote:

> be-loved
> be-spoke
> be-holden
>
> All intensifiers, I think.  And many others, most of which I would not
> utter, seen in the OED's definition of "be-, prefix,"esp. second
> paragraph.   Excerpt:
>
> "In such as be-daub, be-spatter, be-stir, be-strew, the notion of ‘all
> about, all round, over,’ or ‘throughout,’ naturally intensifies the sense
> of the verb; whence, be- comes to be more or less a simple intensive, as in
> be-muddle, be-crowd, be-grudge, be-break,"
>
> Joel
>
>       From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>  To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>  Sent: Thursday, October 6, 2016 1:47 PM
>  Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Urban legend? Or fact?
>
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 11:42 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
>
> ...
>
>
> What is the difference between
>
> "X is widely _beloved_ by all"
>
> - regardless of the number of syllables in _beloved_ -
>
>  and
>
> "X is widely _loved_ by all"?
>
> I've long wondered what the answer may be. Does prefixing _be-_ affect the
> meaning of _loved_, in some way, in this environment, or is it merely a
> pseudo-rhetorical flourish whose function is to fancy up an-otherwise-banal
> _loved_ by giving it a for-the-hell-it extra syllable?
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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