I’m assuming it is something like a Cradle of Civilization (the city of Ur is recognized as one of a handful). They are civilizations of which all other civilizations are derived…they have no predecessor civilizations.
I get that the prefix entered our lexicon from german, but frankly you don't have enough information to say that there is no relation. The city of Ur is 4000 years older than Old High German, and Ur has been used as a metaphor for the origin of things for thousands of years, even ancient Greece. You can't definitively say that the idea of Ur as an origin of civilization had no influence on german.
But in Old German, the prefix ir-/ur- meant "thoroughly", from Proto-Germanic uz-, meaning "out", ultimately from Proto-Indo-European úd-, meaning "outward"/"upward", which is also the origin of the English word "out", as well as the prefix "or-", as in "ordeal". Proto-Indo-European coexisted with Ur, and it doesn't really make sense that Ur would lead to the PIE prefix úd-.
> frankly you don't have enough information to say that there is no relation
I'm not a scholar of this subject. If there is good scholarship out there presenting good arguments in your direction I'll take it. I was just helping out a fellow that has a doubt with my best knowledge of the subject, which is not just a guess.
> has been used as a metaphor for the origin of things for thousands of years, even ancient Greece
Has it really? I'd love to see an example. Sure it's listed in the Bible along with a bunch of other place names, but as a metaphor for the origin of things?
Even if there are examples, I'd really love to see an etymological trace of how it would end up as a prefix. Was it used as such in ancient Greek? In Latin? Sounds like a folk etymology.
Yeah, on second glance I might be confusing some of my sources here. I can’t seem to find what I thought I was remembering.
Regardless, there seems to be a significant distinction between words using a concatenated ur prefix and those using a hyphenated ur-(noun) prefix. In this case, the usage does seem to imply an original language from which all others are derived, and the metaphor seems apt even if it is not historically accurate to say that’s where it came from.
