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I am interested to know if there is any prefix that has become an infix in any language. The base word could be any content word (verb, noun, adjective). I would prefer if its clear that the direction is from prefix to infix and not vice versa.

Noble_Bright_Life
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    Very hypothetical, so I won’t make it an answer, but Jens Elmegård Rasmussen famously (in certain circles) theorised that Indo-European o-grade originated as a prefix he denoted *O̯. His theory was that it had originally been a voiced consonant in Pre-Pre-PIE (probably some sort of labialised uvular, like [ʁʷ]). Metathesis with root-initial consonants to yield allowed clusters had been generalised, yielding an infix, which later merged with the root vowel, rounding it ([ʁʷe] → [o]). The theory is not generally accepted. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 01 '23 at 09:58

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Your best hope is to look here (Alan Yu's dissertation). The problem is that the idea that an infix may have historically developed from a prefix or suffix is taken as a likely truth, so that people say that it is so without sufficient historical evidence. Austronesian -um- is an infix in the proto-language, but people still look at it synchronically as a prefix that is moved into the stem. Yu cites the infix -ʔ- in Tzutujil as a former suffix -b' apparently attested in Mopan, however the detailed historical argument is not made there.

There are a number of cases where, under one view, a glide is inserted after the initial consonant, in Zoque (Mexico) or a number of Plateau language of Nigeria, where a former V prefix is realized as a glide before the stem vowel, thus *i-bon → bjon. The most probable historical path is via coarticulation and vowel reduction, so that ibon → iʲbon → ibʲon → ĭbʲon → bʲon, which is conventionally spelled byon completing the impression of being "inside". My notation above with raised ʲ moving before vs after the consonant is intended to convey the idea that the time course of coarticulation with an adjacent vowel can extend historically so that an earlier overlap at the VC transition can be extended to become more prominent at the release. The pertinent question for these languages, even synchronically, is whether in fact there is a glide that is inserted inside the root, or is this a palatalized consonant at the beginning or the root? In these cases it is very clear that the origin was a separate vowel prefix, what is not clear is whether this constitutes an infix as opposed to an orthographic artifact suggesting "inside".

Another example of such infixation seems to be Pingding Mandarin diminutive -ɭ- infixation, where e.g. xɤu mɤŋ + ɭ → xɤu mɭɤŋ. Yu posits that the same kind of articulatory overlap is responsible, though he posits that it is anticipatory (the lateral is a suffix on the second word, not the first). In the course of explaining the historical origin of this pattern, he actually gives a reasonable basis for concluding that this dialect has developed an expanded series of consonant type, where mɭ is a "labio-lateral".

I would be remiss if I did not mention English infix-shoving. Fan-fuckin-tastic derives from "fucking fantastic", though the infix is not from a prefix, it is from a separate word, and it's not from *"fantastic fucking.

user6726
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