Thursday 31 March 2016

negation - Are there many words that come with “a” as the prefix to mean “no, non” like “asymptomatic” and “apolitical”?

I didn’t know the word, “asymptomatic” to my shame, until I heard the following narration in AP Radio news aired on October 27 through AFN network:




“Dr. Anthony Fauci with the NIH says CDC guidelines for monitoring
health workers back from West Africa are enough to prevent them from
spreading the disease. “Guidelines regarding how you handle people who
coming back should always be based on the science, and the science
tells us that people who are asymptomatic do not transmit.”




I took ‘asymptomatic’ as ‘a symptomatic,’ when my friend in ESS corrected me and told that it’s ‘asymptomatic’ accompanied with prefix “a” meaning “no, non.”



She was right, then I asked her other examples of the words using negative prefix “a,” which I later found Greek origin.
She said she knew some, but can’t reel off them off-hand. Coming home, I tried to find out the samples through Google Search by naively inputting keywords like “negative prefix, a, words." It didn’t work.



Would you suggest me some samples of words that come with negative prefix “a” other than “asymptomatic” and “apolitical,” which I found in SummyB’s previous (Feburuary 2014) question, “If the prefix “a-” means not, shouldn't “await” or “awaiting” mean, “Not waiting?”

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