In my Beowulf class, we’re about two-thirds of the way through. In this week's reading, I learned in line 2085 that Grendel the monster had a bag[1] that was made with orþanc (#); this is glossed as "skill, invention".
The word orþanc made sense to me only after I learned that þanc (the origin of "thanks") meant "thought; favor" and that the or prefix had a cognate in the German Ur, meaning "original" or "proto". So orþanc = "proto-thought", i.e., invention or skill. This sort of thing tickles me.
The or prefix in OE has several meanings, but in this sense of "original/proto" it also shows up in oreald (Ur-old="very old, primeval"[2]) and orlæg (Ur-law="fate, destiny"). This sense of the or prefix stopped being productive in English — that is, we can't create new words with it. But oddly, we did borrow some words from German (mostly in academic contexts) that use the equivalent Ur prefix, as in Urtext.
And maybe the German borrowing is a tiny bit productive? I found cites with references to ur-American, to the Ur- model of the Leica M3 [camera] (#), and to an Ur- boutique hotel (#). On Facebook, the editor and linguist Jonathon Owen found a reference to an "ur-feedback loop".
I don't think this is first time that we lost something in English and then borrowed it back from another language. English has never been fussy about where it gets its words. ??
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