It’s interesting that Esperanto is an artificial language, and its paucity of antonyms is by deliberate design. Orwell’s Newspeak has the same feature (“ungood” = bad), and was in part a satire on Esperanto and similar artificial languages.
I suspect that natural languages generally have primitive antonyms for the most common words. Anna Wierzbicka analysed the language of thought into a small number of “semantic primes”, originally 14 and currently 65. She arrived at these through the study of natural languages, searching for a set of concepts with which any sentence of the target languages could be expressed. Despite the limited inventory, she found reason to include several antonym pairs: same/other, live/die, good/bad, do/don’t, few/many, etc. Even want/not-want was in the original set of 14, although I see that not-want is not in the current set.
Good point, although I used Esperanto precisely because it is a language for which the OP’s approach is transparently difficult. The Greek word for light (in weight) is avaris...not heavy. So in Greek, one must say “This object is easy to lift because of the lowness of its weight,” but in English one can say “This object is light.” Seems arbitrary. I appreciate what the OP is trying to do, though.
Most of the time English has an antonym that does not involve a negative prefix or suffix.
It is not warm. ~= It is cool.
It is not new. ~= It is old.
But this is not the case in other languages. Consider Esperanto:
It is not warm. → Ĝi ne estas varmeta. ~= Ĝi estas malvarmeta.
It is not new. → Ĝi ne estas nova. ~= Ĝi estas malnova.
Because mal- is equivalent to un-, it is forbidden, and you have to resort to periphrasis:
Ĝi estas alia ol varmeta. (It is other than warm.)
Ĝi estas la malo de varmeta. (It is the opposite of warm.)...oh, wait, this contains mal- too.
It’s interesting that Esperanto is an artificial language, and its paucity of antonyms is by deliberate design. Orwell’s Newspeak has the same feature (“ungood” = bad), and was in part a satire on Esperanto and similar artificial languages.
I suspect that natural languages generally have primitive antonyms for the most common words. Anna Wierzbicka analysed the language of thought into a small number of “semantic primes”, originally 14 and currently 65. She arrived at these through the study of natural languages, searching for a set of concepts with which any sentence of the target languages could be expressed. Despite the limited inventory, she found reason to include several antonym pairs: same/other, live/die, good/bad, do/don’t, few/many, etc. Even want/not-want was in the original set of 14, although I see that not-want is not in the current set.
Good point, although I used Esperanto precisely because it is a language for which the OP’s approach is transparently difficult. The Greek word for light (in weight) is avaris...not heavy. So in Greek, one must say “This object is easy to lift because of the lowness of its weight,” but in English one can say “This object is light.” Seems arbitrary. I appreciate what the OP is trying to do, though.