What is the origin of ending a sentence with a preposition-German separable verbs?

Answer 1

I don't know about the linguistic origins, but there might be some structural influence from Latin (were the verb is at the end). More importantly, it is a structural necessity:

Most natural languages fight with what is often referred to as collision.

It is what happens if combinations produce ambiguity. There are countless examples of such things in every language. For example, in English we would say:

"I loved France. Its coastline was beautiful."

Now, the learner of the English language wonders: If "it" in the second sentence refers to France and is indicating genitive, why isn't it "it's", with an apostrophe? The answer is of course, that "it's" collides with being short for "it is". Hence, we can't use it without being ambiguous and had to "come up with" an exception.

Now, that said, let's look into German and take the example "aufheben" (to pick up/lift [or: to keep, or: to repeal]).

Let's look at the nouns of "heben". It's either "Hub" or "Hebel", both indicating a certain force but not a direction.

As "heben" itself is a verb not indicating direction, the preposition "auf" is a common specification.

Correct (but a bit informal):

"Hebst du bitte den Zettel vom Boden auf" - "Can you please pick up that note from the floor"

Incorrect:

"Aufhebst du bitte den Zettel vom Boden" does not work as it would imply that the related noun "Aufhebung" exists. And it does! Only that it has a completely different meaning (repeal). Ignoring transitive/intransitive patterns for now, let's just say that the used tense would not lead any German speaker to think of "Aufhebung" here, but grammatically it is an issue as in many other cases it would. Rather than defining exceptions for such collisions, German "found" a more consistent way here and placed the preposition at the end.

Sneaking out of the misery:

In most cases you can avoid separation and be a little more formal at the same time. In our case:

"Kannst du bitte den Zettel vom Boden aufheben?"

And lastly, let's have some fun!

Who can translate the following sentences?

"Das Gesetz wurde aufgehoben"

"Die Textnachrichten wurden aufgehoben"

"Der Müll wurde aufgehoben"