Talk:Privative

Inconsistency in use of privatives or not?
I feel that there must be some better example of inconsistency than "invaluable". Coming from a non-English background I did not see "invaluable" as the least inconsistent, given that the equivalent in my mother tounge Swedish (ovärderlig) makes it clear that the basis most likely is "value-able" as in "possible to assigne a value to" rather than "valuable" as in "precious". The text does point this out later on but still draws heavily on this mixup to point out that the privative use is inconsistent.

Spontaneously I cannot come up with a more suiting example of the alleged inconsistency, and maybe this inconsistency is just a mirage? Maybe it would be better to write a paragraph about the fact that it sometimes might seem that privatives are used inconsistently in English, although they are not, and then demonstrating it with the two examples used now to show that there are inconsistencies ("invaluable" and "inflammable")?

I don’t feel I have the expertise in this area to say whether there are actually inconcistencies or not so if anyone with deeper knowledge about privatives in English could look over the article that would be great. Eliashedberg (talk) 09:36, 11 July 2012 (UTC)


 * While it has taken nearly two years, Eliashedberg, changes have been made such as you thought were appropriate. "Invaluable" is not a good example of inconsistency in privatives in that it is a perfectly excellent example of a privative. The only trouble is that over the centuries the word "valuable" has lost all (or almost all) of its original meaning--literally, able to be valued, as you point out--and is now (almost) solely used to indicate something considered to be precious.


 * I have also removed references to "inflammable" as being in any way an inconsistent use of a privative as the word does not derive from any privative usage but rather the prefix in- was more of a locative, hence inflammable was quite literally "able (to be caused) to be in flames".


 * I've put the much dreaded and hackneyed citation needed tag next to the statement that English is markedly inconsistent since of the only two examples given the first was not inconsistent and the second was not a privative. Waerloeg (talk) 11:25, 14 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I took the liberty of removing the unsupported claims altogether. In case there are indeed a lot of inconsistencies with privatives in English, let’s add that information when we have sources supporting it. For now I think we have an interesting section on the tricky task of correctly judging the etymology of a word (or a part of it). /Eliashedberg (talk) 14:59, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Is this article correct? What are the authorities.
I studied linguistics. I learned the word "privative", and it didn't mean what this article says it does.

It's likely that I'm wrong and the article is right, but it still caught me up short, and I'd like to know the truth of the matter.

I note that there are no citations to back up the purported meaning of "privative"; the article has five citations, one concerning the etymology of the word, which I do not dispute, and the other four backing up the discussion of the multiple senses of the prefix "in-".

To me, "privative" refers to word or affix that means "without" or "lacking". For an example, the English suffix -less, as in bloodless or painless is a privative suffix.

I would have gone the usual route of putting a "citation needed" tag on the relevant statements in the article, but I wanted to be a little more explicit about the problem I think I detect. The word is used in the sense I am familiar with in Dixon and Blake's Handbook of Australian Languages, John Benjamins, 1983. Can anyone come up with a cite for the sense claimed in the article? Thank you.

ACW (talk) 13:32, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
 * You are completely wright and still so completely wrong What you are referring to is the privative case. --سلوك Saluk 06:23, 8 June 2018 (UTC)