Theme Sufbixes and prefixes

Theme Sufbixes and prefixes
Contents

• 
  1English language
  
  • 
    1.1List of English derivational prefixes
    
  • 
    1.2Hyphenation
    
• 
  2Japanese language
  
• 
  3Bantu languages
  
  • 
    3.1Example from Luganda
    
• 
  4Navajo
  
• 
  5Sunwar
  
• 
  6Russian
  
• 
  7German
  

• 
  1Examples
  
  • 
    1.1English
    
  • 
    1.2French
    
  • 
    1.3German
    
  • 
    1.4Russian
    
  • 
    1.5Barngarla
    
• 
  2Inflectional suffixes
  
  • 
    2.1Verbs
    
  • 
    2.2Nouns
    
  • 
    2.3Adjectives and Adverbs
    
• 
  3Derivation
  
• 
  4Synthetic languages
  

A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word.^[1] Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix un- is added to the word happy, it creates the word unhappy. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed.

Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of the word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category (but playing a different role in the sentence), or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category.^[2] Prefixes, like all other affixes, are usually bound morphemes.^[1]
In English, there are no inflectional prefixes; English uses suffixes instead for that purpose.
The word prefix is itself made up of the stem fix (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix pre- (meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots.