Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Two different opposites

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Monday, January 12, 2004, 17:56
Gary Shannon wrote:

>It's interesting that there can sometimes be more than >one "opposite" to a word. While I was atempting to >discover which verb roots are necessary and which can >be formed by a negating prefix on the root, I noticed >that I need two different negating prefixes, one for >"un" and one for "not". > >
Well, 'not'(on verbs) does not oppose, but makes things absent(linguistic term for this?), whereas un- makes things opposite. On the other hand, on adjectives, they are identical, making things absent or opposite, depending on the adjective in question. There is, however, a third possibility is some things, and in some, it's not even included into English. For instance, we have 'welcome' 'unwelcome', and 'neither welcome nor unwelcome'. I suggest a new prefix 'en-'. For instance 'enfast' means 'not fast', but 'unfast' means 'slow'.

Replies

Jean-François Colson <fa597525@...>
Tristan McLeay <zsau@...>
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>