German verbs starting with “emp”

In German, very often new verbs are created from existing verbs by adding a prefix.

Sometimes these prefixes are meaningful, and it is easy to see what they mean. For example “heraus” means “out”, so “herausgehen” (out + go) means “to go out”.

But sometimes the prefixes don’t mean anything, or their meaning is very abstract and hard to grasp, as shown in this table of German inseparable verb prefixes.

A few days ago I became particularly interested in the “emp” prefix, because of the following six words:

• fehlen = to lack
• empfehlen = to suggest
• fangen = to catch
• empfangen = to receive
• finden = to find
• empfinden = to feel

I failed to understand what the “emp” prefix means, so I wondered what other words have it. The [list of all German words][wl] came to my rescue. It turned out that no other German verb has this prefix. (There are a few verbs starting with “emp”, like “empören”, but in their case “emp” is not a proper prefix, because there is no such verb as “ören”).

So I can just forget trying to grasp the meaning of “emp”, memorize these 6 words, and live happily ever after.