Privative Totally Explained

Everything about Privative totally explained

A privative, named from Latin, "to deprive", is a particle that negates or inverts the value of the stem of the word. In Indo-European languages many privatives are prefixes; but they can also be suffixes, or more independent elements.

Privative prefixes

In English there are three primary privative prefixes, all cognate from PIE:

from West Germanic; for example unprecedented, unbelievable
from Latin; for example incapable, inarticulate.
, called alpha privative, from Ancient Greek, ; for example apathetic, abiogenesis.

These all stem from a PIE syllabic nasal privative *n̥-, the zero ablaut grade of the negation *ne, for example "n" used as a vowel, as in some English pronunciations of "button". This is the source of the 'n' in 'an-' privative prefixed nouns deriving from the Greek, which had both. For this reason, it appears as an- before vowel, for example anorexia, anesthesia.
The same prefix appears in Sanskrit, also as a-, an-. In North Germanic languages, the -n- has disappeared and Old Norse has ú- (for example ú-dáins-akr), Danish and Norwegian have u-, whereas Swedish uses o, and Icelandic uses the etymologically related ó.
Privative suffixes
Some languages have privative suffixes; -less is an example in English, and -t(a)lan or -t(e)len is an example in Hungarian (a non-IE language).

Further Information
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