Consider the following minimal pair:
edere panem 'to eat (the) bread'
comedere panem 'to eat up the bread'
When a resultative prefix is present (e.g. com- in comedere), panem is necessarily understood as definite (or at least it is understood as specific. See the comments below). In contrast, when this prefix is absent (e.g. in edere), panem can be understood as non-specific/partitive (e.g. '(some) bread') but also as definite/specific (e.g. 'the bread'). If so, edere panem is ambiguous (see the parentheses in 'to eat (the) bread') but comedere panem is not: in the latter case only a definite/specific reading of panem is possible. Is this contrast in ambiguity correct? A similar pair would be: bibere vinum vs. ebibere vinum. Furthermore, note that there appears to be a well-known parallelism between Latin prefixes and English particles in these contrasts: e.g. cf. the well-formedness of 'to eat up {the bread/the apples}' vs. the ill-formedness of '*to eat up {bread/apples}'.
Aspectually speaking, it seems clear that in comedere panem we get a telic reading, whereby an appropriate modifier could be 'in X time', whereas in edere panem we (typically?) get an atelic reading, whereby an appropriate modifier could be 'for X time'. However, given the ambiguity above of edere panem, I'd also expect that this unprefixed predicate edere panem could be interpreted as a telic predicate. Is my expectation correct? Cf. also Eng. 'to eat bread for hours' (only atelic reading), 'to eat the bread {for/in} five minutes' ({atelic/telic} reading), and 'to eat the bread up in five minutes' (only telic reading). Note also the aspectual ambiguity of the second case (like in Latin?).
Concerning contrasts like the one given in the title, I was also wondering to what extent Latin can be said to behave like languages without articles like Russian and other Slavic languages, which have a very rich/complex system of prefixation. Any comments on similarities and differences between Latin and Russian regarding contrasts like the one exemplified in the title would also be welcome.
NB I: my present question only holds for Early Latin and Classical Latin. As is well-known, Late Latin is very different in this respect since prefixed verbs like comedere can also be interpreted as atelic/unbounded predicates (i.e., the contrast between edere and comedere is blurred in Late Latin). In Late Latin many subtle (but very important!) distinctions of the prefixation system found in Early and Classical Latin are blurred: for example, erubescere can only be interpreted as a telic change of state verb in Early & Classical Latin ('to become/turn red'). In contrast, erubescere can be interpreted as a stative verb 'to be ashamed' in Late Latin, a reading which is fully impossible in previous stages. Rubere would be used instead (for related discussion, see aret = aridus est? ).
NB II: in Romance languages like Spanish or Catalan the translation of the Latin examples above would be: edere panem Sp. 'comer (el) pan' & comedere panem Sp. 'comerse el pan'. Note the ungrammaticaliy of Sp. *comerse pan. The so-called "completive/aspectual se" requires its direct object be definite/specific.