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I am specifically thinking of the word angry. If un- is generally used as a negative prefix applied to words of Germanic origin, why not angry, since I believe it comes from Old Norse? Is there a rule that states which adjectives can and cannot accept negative prefixes and must rely upon negative adverbs such as not?

BarFlyBzzz
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    But un- is not generally used as a negative prefix applied to Germanic words. It's true that when un- appears, it's on Germanic words; but this is derivational morphology in English, and thus which Germanic words it appears on is arbitrary, and angry is not one of them. – John Lawler Oct 11 '21 at 01:12
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    Thanks for the response. So there is no linguistic reason and it is just based on common usage? I suspected this but wanted confirmation. A student asked me why we say 'unhappy' but not 'unangry' and I was stumped. – BarFlyBzzz Oct 11 '21 at 02:02

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First, it's not very accurate to say that un- is applied to words of Germanic origin. Many adjectives built on Latin or French bases can be prefixed with un-, such as unpleasant, unrealistic, unlimited, unconditional, uncomfortable, and hundreds more. I wrote an answer with some other examples here. It's more accurate to say that the negative prefix in-/im-/ir-/il-/ig- occurs exclusively with words of Latinate origin, whereas un- is possible with adjectives of any etymological origin, but especially productive with adjectives with certain endings (such as -ed or -ing).

As you've observed, un- cannot be added to all adjectives. There's no simple explanation for it that I know of, so it's just something that I would say needs to be memorized. Googling the topic led me to a 213 page disseration on the topic, "Creative prefixations and the prefix un-: A cognitive linguistic analysis", by Balázs Bernadette (2016)–I only skimmed it, but the length and the parts that I did read are consistent with my guess that there is no simple answer to why unangry isn't typically used.

herisson
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