Sagio

When I learned the English word “presage”¹ meaning “to show that something (bad) will happen”, another English word popped right into my head, which is “sagacious”.

The Latin “sāgiō” basically means “I perceive”. This explains why the word “sagacious” means “exhibiting acuteness of mental discernment”. The word presage turns out to be the combination of “pre-“ (meaning “in advance”) and sāgiō (cf. predict, prophecy, prescient, etc.).

The word sāgiō itself comes from the PIE “*seh₂g-“ (“to seek out”), which is understandable since when you try to seek something out, you probably need to perceive acutely. This PIE root has an English descendant “seek” as well, which totally makes sense

By the way, I didn’t know that the word “beseech” is composed of the intensifying prefix “be-“ and “seek”. Although they have a clear phonological difference today (/k/, /tʃ/), the boundary is not really clear in Middle English (beseech may be spelt beseek, while seek may be spelt seech)²³⁴.