Are there many words that come with “a” as the prefix to mean “no, non” like “asymptomatic” and “apolitical”?

Question

I didn’t know the word, “asymptomatic” to my shame, until I heard the following narration in AP Radio news aired on October 27 through AFN network:

“Dr. Anthony Fauci with the NIH says CDC guidelines for monitoring health workers back from West Africa are enough to prevent them from spreading the disease. “Guidelines regarding how you handle people who coming back should always be based on the science, and the science tells us that people who are asymptomatic do not transmit.”

I took ‘asymptomatic’ as ‘a symptomatic,’ when my friend in ESS corrected me and told that it’s ‘asymptomatic’ accompanied with prefix “a” meaning “no, non.”

She was right, then I asked her other examples of the words using negative prefix “a,” which I later found Greek origin. She said she knew some, but can’t reel off them off-hand. Coming home, I tried to find out the samples through Google Search by naively inputting keywords like “negative prefix, a, words." It didn’t work.

Would you suggest me some samples of words that come with negative prefix “a” other than “asymptomatic” and “apolitical,” which I found in SummyB’s previous (Feburuary 2014) question, “If the prefix “a-” means not, shouldn't “await” or “awaiting” mean, “Not waiting?”

Answer 1

A- :

• prefix meaning "not," from Greek a-, an- "not," from PIE root *ne "not" (see un-).

There are quite a lot, but many of them are not common. Here is a list.

As for await:, the suffix 'a' has a different origin, from 'ad' (meaning 'to').

• early 13c., awaiten, from Old North French awaitier (Old French agaitier) "to lie in wait for, watch, observe," from a- "to" (see ad-) + waitier "to watch" (see wait (v.)). Originally especially with a hostile sense. Related: Awaited; awaiting.

Ad:

• word-forming element expressing direction toward or in addition to, from Latin ad "to, toward" in space or time; "with regard to, in relation to," as a prefix, sometimes merely emphatic, from PIE *ad- "to, near, at" (cognate with Old English æt; see at). Simplified to a- before sc-, sp- and st-; modified to ac- before many consonants and then re-spelled af-, ag-, al-, etc., in conformity with the following consonant (as in affection, aggression). In Old French, reduced to a- in all cases (an evolution already underway in Merovingian Latin), but written forms in French were refashioned after Latin in 14c. and English did likewise 15c. in words it had picked up from Old French. In many cases pronunciation followed the shift.

Answer 2

a-words used for negation: asexual, atheist, atypical, apolitical, asymptomatic

a-words not used for negation: afoul, aground, afloat, adrift, afoot, asleep, aplenty, aside

English is a weird language.

Answer 3

They must be adjectives to take "non" meaning, so many of the words being contemplated are verbs which are not marked for the negative "a" morpheme. There's no shame in asking such a question. My Japanese wife just asked me the exact same question.