English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Sometimes it's difficult for me as a learner to remember the negative word as a new word with prefix. For example, the negative of pleasant is unpleasant.
Can I safely use not instead? I'm not intending to not learn new words, but I want to prevent something awkward happening if, for example, I want to say the negative word for honest and mistakenly I say unhonest instead of dishonest.
Is it always safe to use 'not' for words I want to negate, or there are particular words where it isn't safe?
Often the "un" form is stronger than the not form.
happy neutral sad
more happy <----------|------|------|--------->less happy
Unhappy is often roughly the same as "sad", but "not happy" could include "neutral" and "sad"
And there are things to watch out for:
You look not happy.
You don't look happy.
Only the second of these is idiomatic.
While you can be understood with "not ...", developing fluency means being confident with the un- in- dis- and other negating prefixes.
In short, it is unsafe to default to 'not' as your meaning could easily be misconstrued. It's also not a good habit to form for your long term progress.
There are some words that can take several different negative prefixes, and the different compound words have different meanings. Typically, one is the simple antonym and the others have narrower meanings. Non- typically means “something other than,” dis- “the opposite of, in a bad way,” a- “not having,” and anti- “opposed to,” but un- can be particularly flexible. Which words allow which prefixes is completely arbitrary. Some examples include:
Non-moral (not a moral issue), versus immoral (worthy of moral condemnation) versus amoral (a person who does not believe in right or wrong, an action taken without regard for morality, or something that lacks any moral dimension)
Uninterested (not interested) versus disinterested (having no conflict of interest). Watch out, though: some native speakers use these as synonyms, and others consider that an error
Nonfunctional (not functional) versus dysfunctional (functions in an awful or abusive way)—but note that dysfunction is a noun that means a failure to function, malfunction is either a noun or verb that means to function incorrectly, and there is no such word as *nonfunction or *malfunctional. (But there is malfunctioning.)
Nonsexual (content that is not sexual), versus asexual (an organism without sexual differentiation, or a person without a sex drive) versus antisexual (opposed to sex)
Unconcerted (not concerted, unplanned, not an organized effort) versus disconcerted (confused, perturbed)
Non-sensitive (not painful to touch) versus insensitive (not sensitive to other people’s feelings, callous)
Sometimes the base word and a compound that reverses it have evolved so much that they no longer are even opposites. The words ingenuous, disingenuous and ingenue have diverged to the point that they no longer have anything to do with each other. They all derive from the same word meaning “honest, plain-speaking, high-minded” (or literally, possessing “inborn” virtue), which came to mean naïve and honest to a fault, but ingenuous got mixed up with ingenious, an ingenue is an innocent young woman, and disingenuous means pretending not to understand or know things that you really do. An example is when antisemites disingenuously pretend that the word antisemitic means something other than hating Jews and act like it refers to the Semitic language group. The people who say that know better and are trolling.
That was also an example of how in- sometimes means the-opposite-of, but often is a fossilized Latin preposition instead. An ingenious person is clever and inventive, not the opposite of a genius.
Similarly, unbarred means not blocked or prohibited, but disbarred comes from a different root and means that someone was banned from the legal profession for unethical conduct. However, an unfrocked Catholic is a (rarely-used word for a) defrocked priest, not a layperson, and unrobed is a rarely-used synonym for disrobed.
In front of some ethnonyms, such as American, Christian, Muslim or so on, you can add negative prefixes with very different connotations. Non-Jewish is a neutral term meaning “not Jewish,” Anti-Muslim is a disparaging term meaning “bigoted against Muslims,” and un-Christian means “hypocritically antithetical to the values of Christianity.” The exact connotations vary.
Or to get really obscure, anti-establishment means trying to topple the powers that be, non-establishment means holding different views, but disestablishment has a very narrow meaning: abolishing what the U.S. Constitution calls a “law regarding an establishment of religion,” and revoking the special legal status of a state religion. There’s even a word antidisestablishmentarianism, the movement of people opposed to disestablishing the state religion, although most appearances of it are in lists of the longest English words.
There are some cases where not X and unX aren't equivalent, for example unbelievable and not believable:
This person is unbelievable. (amazing, astonishing)
This person is not believable. (not trustworthy)
at least one case where X and inX share the same meaning (from @abligh's comment):
Flammable
Inflammable
same with X and irX:
Regardless
Irregardless
These are all corner cases, though. I guess using not X would work in most situations, at least for you to be understood.
Many valid points in the three other answers so far, feel free to unaccept mine and pick another one!
Also, regarding the negative sentences such as,
The meanings are not equivalent. The first sentence means that there were no incidents, etc. to spoil the experience while the second emphasizes that the person making the journey actively enjoyed it.
This answer seems a duplicate of the accepted answer by @jillagre, but I aim to show that the nonequivalence may hold even when using adjectives which the OP gave examples of.
To add to James' answer on the word "happy", note that "really unhappy" is different from "not really happy", and although "not" in the second phrase modifies "really", one might be tempted to use that phrase if one tries to avoid the "un-" prefix.
The question was about adjectives that take un. The question is not about negative prefixes in general. However, I have given an overview below taken from a very good online site.
unpleasant = not pleasant
unbelievable = not believable [excluding the slang-ish meaning of unbelievable]
unchanged = not changed
untarnished = not tarnished
unhappy = not happy
unhinged = not hinged [as a door not being hinged, not the slang-ish meaning of unhinged]
unfriendly = not friendly
However, if the word changes as in dishonest, you can also use: not honest
dishonest = not honest
disused = not used
Negative statements are the opposite of affirmative statements. In English, one way to make negative statements is by adding negative prefixes to nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Here are some English negative prefixes: a-, dis-, il-, im-, in-, ir-, non-, un-. For example, the prefix un- can be attached to the adjective happy to create the negative adjective unhappy. Or you can use the negative adverb not. Note that there is no difference in meaning between these two forms. Un- Prefix negative prefixes
More examples with other prefixes:
abnormal = not normal
disassembled= not assembled
illiterate = not literate
immaterial = not material
insensitive = not sensitive
irreverent = not reverent
non-vaccinated = not vaccinated
unappealing = not appealing
Not all words that appear to have a negative prefix actually do: irrigate, for example. [Also, from that website].
If a word like honest has a negative prefix like dishonest, you can't just change the prefix but you can always use: not honest.
For the full story, please visit the link.
