Wandering Words

I've been thinking more about "separable prefixes," a truly bizarre phenomenon of German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Hungarian (the last probably acquired the feature from German). The linguistics literati prefer the term "separable particle," which is more apt, since a prefix which wanders to the end of the clause would be a strange prefix indeed. This thing which is not a prefix could not be a clitic, either; a clitic could wander to the end of the clause, but a clitic must hang on some other word, and that is not required of the "separable prefix." Such confusion is not uncommon: the Greeks used the term "tmesis", "a cutting," to indicate a prefix which in certain cases could separate from the verb and go elsewhere in the line of poetry. In that case, however, the Greeks were looking backwards; since tmesis only occurs in forms of the language that tend towards archaism, the separation is actually a conjunction! English has adverbs and prepositions, but the use in a particular verbal phrase must be one or the other. Every grammar of a language is a snapshot, and therefore has features in transition; in the case of German, these features are the "separable prefixes" and a case system on the verge of collapse.