(West) Germanic Verbal Prefixes

>From <http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050425/80/fh4b1.html>: 'They wanted to befool
us by saying they brought in scrapped metals...'

My question: what is the exact semantic value of the prefix be-, and how
productive does consensus allow it to be today?

In the broader scheme of things, what is the origin of the Germanic pefixes,
particularly be- and ge-? I seem to recall that they are limited to West
Germanic; is there any IE etymology for them? I used to think that ge- had
its origin as a perfect reduplication that then got generalized as a set
prefix to other verbs - hey, it wasn't a bad theory when I was 17...

Thanks,
Neeraj Mathur


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