derSammler wrote:Errius wrote:Understandable mistake though for people learning the language.
Mind you, the corresponding prefix in German, "ent-", has exactly the same ambiguousness.
Huh. Now that's a bit of trivia I'm definitely going to remember.
Also, you got me curious:
I suspected they had a common ancestry and looked at inflame on Etymonline and Wiktionary but came away unsatisfied. The "in-" from "inflame" does trace all the way back to Proto-Indo-European essentially unchanged, and two of the Middle English forms it took were "enflamen" and "enflaumen", but Wiktionary didn't have an entry for what Google Translate gave me for inflame in German (entflammen) and the Wiktionary entry for "ent-" only talked about an etymology based in meaning "and", so, without speaking German or knowing a more complete English-language site with German etymology, I wasn't able to trace the German back, the way I was with the English.
(inflame/enflame (Modern English) -> inflammen/enflamen/enflaumen (Middle English) -> enflammer (Old French) -> inflammare (Latin) -> "in-" inherited from Proto-Indo-European.)
I also got curious about the use of the terminology and popped over to the Wikipedia Combustability and flammability page. It turns out there's been an effort since the 1950s to retire "inflammable" in favour of "flammable" for exactly this reason (ie. it's a safety hazard) and "non-flammable" is the most direct antonym for "flammable". ("non-inflammable" is valid as the most direct opposite for "inflammable", but awkward-sounding.)
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