English Language & Usage Asked by alcedine on August 2, 2021
As far as I can find, there’s this set of words for burying things and digging them up:
inhume and inter, both meaning put into earth
disinter (and apparently disinhume) meaning unput into earth
exhume, meaning take out of earth
But exter is missing, which I find peculiar. After all, it’s all just putting things in and taking things ex of terra or humus, so you would expect a full complement, but this does not happen. The same pattern may emerge in other words as well, though none come to mind at the moment. Is there a subtle linguistic reason for which constructions pass into usage, or is it just an accident of history?
It's just a pitfall of taking the English language from Latin. Many words with prefixes that have opposites (e.g., in ↔ ex, pro ↔ anti, pre ↔ post) did not get their complementary opposite word.
A good example is disgust. The prefix dis- has several opposites, but the word disgust (root gust, meaning taste or stomach) has no complementary opposite using the opposite prefix.
Correct answer by Adam on August 2, 2021
The opposite of inter, when referring to burying a dead body, is disinter, which can be interchanged with exhume.
Answered by Nunya Biznes on August 2, 2021
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