First, I've got to give you the answer you might find both obvious and counter-intuitive: The reason why you say disarm, rather than unarm, is because... well... most people around you use the former (as usual in most varieties of English). The dictionary does cite "unarm" as a possible synonymous (albeit a rare one). So, the real question is: why did you think you couldn't say it?

One of the possible reasons would be if disarm were used to mean To divest of a weapon or weapons, whereas unarm were described as referring to the action of divesting both armor and arms. In that case, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that English speakers now used unarm only for armors, and disarm for arms. Should that be the case, it would be like "to starve", that used to mean "to die" and, after a while, got its more restricted usage because the verb "to die" was around, and there was no need for this redundancy.

But, according to google, "I unarm" is quite a rare way of saying "I disarm", so this just seems to be a word that died out because of the redundancy I mentioned - if you have two words competing for the same meaning, and there's no semantic drift (i.e. both words retain the same meaning), one of them shall prevail after a while. And, in this case, disarm had the advantage of being a loan word from the French "desarmer", and was probably more used since the beginning.

And, if finally, you want to know why it isn't something like "anarmer" in French, well, that's because "des-" is pretty much the only prefix used (as far as I remember) to mean the opposite, as far as I remember, in Latin languages. For example, "fazer" in Portuguese means "to do", while "desfazer" means "to undo"; "instalar" in Portuguese means "to install", and "desinstalar" means to "uninstall" (yeah, I know "deinstall" exists); and, finally, "armar" means "to arm" and I guess you know what "desarmar" means

Long story short: You say "to disarm" simply because that's how you hear it being used all the time, and now you know why

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Last edited by Lira on Jul-14-2008 at 17:04

Gay, bro.

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Yay for Lira.

quote:

Originally posted by idoru

The Decola?

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quote:

Originally posted by kadomony The Decola?

The discola.

disdress this instant

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quote:

Originally posted by Lira First, I've got to give you the answer you might find both obvious and counter-intuitive: The reason why you say disarm, rather than unarm, is because... well... most people around you use the former (as usual in most varieties of English). The dictionary does cite "unarm" as a possible synonymous (albeit a rare one). So, the real question is: why did you think you couldn't say it? One of the possible reasons would be if disarm were used to mean To divest of a weapon or weapons, whereas unarm were described as referring to the action of divesting both armor and arms. In that case, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that English speakers now used unarm only for armors, and disarm for arms. Should that be the case, it would be like "to starve", that used to mean "to die" and, after a while, got its more restricted usage because the verb "to die" was around, and there was no need for this redundancy. But, according to google, "I unarm" is quite a rare way of saying "I disarm", so this just seems to be a word that died out because of the redundancy I mentioned - if you have two words competing for the same meaning, and there's no semantic drift (i.e. both words retain the same meaning), one of them shall prevail after a while. And, in this case, disarm had the advantage of being a loan word from the French "desarmer", and was probably more used since the beginning. And, if finally, you want to know why it isn't something like "anarmer" in French, well, that's because "des-" is pretty much the only prefix used (as far as I remember) to mean the opposite, as far as I remember, in Latin languages. For example, "fazer" in Portuguese means "to do", while "desfazer" means "to undo"; "instalar" in Portuguese means "to install", and "desinstalar" means to "uninstall" (yeah, I know "deinstall" exists); and, finally, "armar" means "to arm" and I guess you know what "desarmar" means Long story short: You say "to disarm" simply because that's how you hear it being used all the time, and now you know why

is that a really long way of saying that if you never had arms youre unarmed, and if you removed arms you disarmed?

and LOL @ RJT calling anything gay. yeah, philosophy is real hetero bro

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN is that a really long way of saying that if you never had arms youre unarmed, and if you removed arms you disarmed?

Not really. Even though that's what we intuitively have as true now, that was an attempt to explain why it is so, as "unarm" used to be a synonymous verb.

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Last edited by Lira on Jul-14-2008 at 13:48

quote:

Originally posted by Lira Not really. Even though that's what we intuitively have as true now, that was an attempt to explain why it is so, as "unarm" used to be a synonymous verb.

stop being smarter than me cvnt

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quote:

Originally posted by Lira In that case, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that English speakers now used unarm only for armors, and disarm for arms.

Nobody uses "unarm" as a verb, as far as I know. I've never heard it used that way in actual conversation or seen an example of that usage outside of a dictionary.

The adjective "unarmed" is used to mean that you don't currently have a weapon -- whether you never had one or someone took it from you.

The only "un-" verb I can think of in common usage is "unman," but there are probably more examples.

...

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