Latin Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers, and students wanting to discuss the finer points of the Latin language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In Ancient Greek, the "privative alpha" is a negating prefix, cognate to Latin in- (as in "in-conceivable", not "in-flammable") and English "un-". It survives in English in words like "a-typical" and "an-archy".
But when asking this question, about a name with a privative alpha, I realized there's one important thing I never learned. Is that alpha long or short? And is it consistently one or the other, or does it vary?
Alpha privative was short in Ancient Greek, as shown in Smyth (1920) §885 (a long vowel would have been written with a macron, rendered on the Perseus website as an underscore after the vowel).
Alpha from PIE syllabic n was short as a general rule.
