An Analysis of Japanese Negative Kango Prefixes: “FU-“, ”MU-“, ”HI-“ and ”MI-” : With a Focus on Gairaigo Derivatives

“FU-”, ”MU-”, ”HI-”, ”MI-” are all Japanese Kango Prefixes showing negative meanings. Prior researches on the for prefixes mostly focus on their Kango and Wago derivatives. For examples, “FUTEGIWA”, “MUSHINKEI”, “HIKOUKAI”, “MIKANSEI”..etc. However, we found that in recent years, Gairaigo are not only borrowed words from foreign languages, but also have word-forming abilities to create new vocabularies. Such as “HIMISUTERII”, “MUDAIYA”, “MICHARANGI” are all derivatives with combinations of negative Kango prefixes and Gairaigo roots.
The purpose of this article is to analyze the derivatives with combinations of the four negative Kango prefixes and Gairaigo roots. The analysis was made from three prospects: The word classes of the Gairaigo roots, ranges where the negative prefixes cover, functions of the negative prefixes. Furthermore, we took those derivatives to compare with the traditional derivatives with the combinations of “FU-”, ”MU-”, ”HI-”, ”MI-”+Kango or Wago roots, in order to find out the similarities and differences between the two sets of derivatives. Through the comparison processes, we were able to summarize the word-forming features of the “FU-”, ”MU-”, ”HI-”, ”MI-”+ Gairaigo roots. At the end, we also indicated the essential differences between the derivatives of the “FU-”, ”MU-”, ”HI-”, ”MI-”+ Gairaigo roots and the traditional “FU-”, ”MU-”, ”HI-”, ”MI-”+Kango or Wago roots on the base of positive-negative spectrums.