Subject: Re: de-, un- ce zo'e

From: "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 08:27:45 -0000

--- In [email-masked], Pierre Abbat <phma@o...> wrote:

> The confusion is at least largely from the presence in English of two pre=
fixes
> un-. One means "not" and is the cognate of German un-, Latin in-, Greek a=
n-,
> and Russian ne-; the other means "opposite" and is the cognate of German =
ent-,
> Greek anti-, and nothing springs to mind in Russian. They can often be ap=
plied
> to the same word: a string can be untied, meaning that it is not tied and=
may
> never have been tied; or it can be untied, meaning that someone unties it=
.

Being anything else than a scholar of German grammar, just one remark (I th=
ink .ivan. can help here!):

German "ent-" doesn't function the way like Greek "anti-" does. Comparing E=
nglish and German use of "un-" maybe will show the 
difference:
a string can be untied, meaning that it is not tied = "ungebunden" (not bou=
nd, free, loose etc.)
untied, meaning that someone unties/had untied it = "entbinden/entbunden"(=
e.g. give birth, set free from an obligatione etc.)

In German, there's no way to say "unbinden" i.e. in the sense of English "u=
ntie" (aufbinden, lösen etc.)

.aulun.