[kgeist]

Interesting, zer- seems to be similar to Slavic raz- somewhat.

In Russian: davit - press, razdavit - to crush.

Siedlung corresponds to Russian selenie "settlement". Zersiedlung appears to correspond to "rasselenie" (morphologically) and it means more like settlement as a dispersion, movement from a single point in different outward directions.

So I suspect zer- doesn't mean destruction per se, it's just that destruction often involves this movement of parts in outward directions from an original center, which explains the frequent association of zer- with destruction.

[Zak]

My impression is that German prefixes don't have such well-defined meanings that a new word created with one automatically has an unambiguous definition relative to the base word. There seem to be parallels with raz- but I'm not sure if they have a common root.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o...