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Someone unquoted wrote:
> > Ur was the town where Job lived (as in "The Book
> > of Job" and "the patience
> > of Job"). It's often used in the sense of "the
> > oldest" or "the original"
> > ("ur-man")--almost like "proto-man".
Yes, but that's because Ur is where Abraham lived, not
because of Job. As much as I remember my Bible classes
anyway, Abraham come rather earlier in the story,
doesn't he?
Jan Henning <henning -at- r-l -dot- de> wrote:
> The meaning is described correctly, the etymology
> isn't (according to Chambers dictionary): "Ur-" is a
> German prefix meaning "the protoypical" or "the
> oldest". It has been borrowed in this meaning by
> the English. "Ur-" appears to have common roots with
> "out".
But isn't it possible German took the prefix from the
Aramaic and that the prefix's etmology goes back to
the Biblical town?
> And, while we're at it: It's not "uber", it's
> "über".
Someone once taught me that when writing in English
words that in German have umlauts one is supposed to
use an 'e' instead, which would make it ueber if we
were writing the German word. Is that true?
> I know that everybody in the English world
> mispronounces it "uber", but that's no
> excuse to misspell it as well ;-)
I gotta say, though, that in this case the word
actually isn't misspelled and mispronounced. It's an
English word, derived from the German.
