If you recall Humpty’s un-birthday present in Lewis  Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, perhaps you already realised what a scandi thing he was doing with the English language…

Un-, of course, is still quite a productive prefix in English today. Pop it onto a word and you usually trigger a kind of semantic reversion. With adjectives, it’ll tend to mean ‘not that’, giving us unfriendly, unhelpful and so on. On a verb, it’ll often mean the undoing of the original action: think unfriend. Imagine a world where some new tech allows us to splook something; it’s not too outlandish to imagine that unsplooking might quickly become an equally common concept.

Where it’s not so productive in English is precisely where Carroll used it above – with nouns. What would an undog be, for instance? Or an unholiday? We can sort of use our imaginations to come up with plausible meanings, as Carroll did, but they still sound a bit… odd.

An u-engelsk prefix

Now, Norwegian has an equivalent prefix to the English un-: the even snappier u-. It can work in exactly the same way as it does in English, too. If you know the base word, you get the u- version for free, with ulovlig (unlawful) and uimotståelig (irresistible) being fairly transparent semantically. (By the way, check out this gloriously insane MGP song if you wonder where I picked up the latter word!)

But, unlike English, Norwegian can pop that prefix onto nouns, too. And rather than the sense of opposite, we get something a little more nuanced than the un- in un-birthday. Norwegian u- + noun gives us  the idea of “a bad version of X”. It’s a pejorating prefix, making negative all it touches.

And this wasn’t always foreign to English, either. Old English used un- in exactly the same way. Take the word unfrēond (unfriend) – oddly farmiliar to us today. But in Old English, it was a noun with the meaning of enemy. Take that, unfriends!

A Few Un-Words

In English, prefixes like non– and mis– stepped in to fill this function eventually, while un- narrowed to adjectives and verbs. It’s still very much a thing in Norwegian, though, and here are a few of my favourites:

• vær (weather) → uvær (un-weather : inclement weather)
• dyr (animal) → udyr (un-animal : a monster!)
• år (year) → uår (un-year : a bad year – think ‘failed crops’ of the type they lynched Denmark’s Olof over)

There are tons of them about when you start looking. In Oslo recently, I also spotted the following sign in a public loo – i ustand. Plainly speaking, that’s just out of order, but taken literally it’s ‘in an un-state’, which is so much more to-the-point!

I wonder what Lewis Carroll would have made of it?